@article{EstherGroeneveldEnrightetal.2010,
  author    = {Esther, Alexandra and Groeneveld, Juergen and Enright, Neal J. and Miller, Ben P. and Lamont, Byron B. and Perry, George L. W. and Blank, F. Benjamin and Jeltsch, Florian},
  title     = {Sensitivity of plant functional types to climate change : classification tree analysis of a simulation model},
  issn      = {1100-9233},
  doi       = {10.1111/j.1654-1103.2009.01155.x},
  year      = {2010},
  abstract  = {Question: The majority of studies investigating the impact of climate change on local plant communities ignores changes in regional processes, such as immigration from the regional seed pool. Here we explore: (i) the potential impact of climate change on composition of the regional seed pool, (ii) the influence of changes in climate and in the regional seed pool on local community structure, and (iii) the combinations of life history traits, i.e. plant functional types (PFTs), that are most affected by environmental changes. Location: Fire-prone, Mediterranean-type shrublands in southwestern Australia. Methods: Spatially explicit simulation experiments were conducted at the population level under different rainfall and fire regime scenarios to determine the effect of environmental change on the regional seed pool for 38 PFTs. The effects of environmental and seed immigration changes on local community dynamics were then derived from community-level experiments. Classification tree analyses were used to investigate PFT- specific vulnerabilities to climate change. Results: The classification tree analyses revealed that responses of PFTs to climate change are determined by specific trait characteristics. PFT-specific seed production and community patterns responded in a complex manner to climate change. For example, an increase in annual rainfall caused an increase in numbers of dispersed seeds for some PFTs, but decreased PFT diversity in the community. Conversely, a simulated decrease in rainfall reduced the number of dispersed seeds and diversity of PFTs. Conclusions: PFT interactions and regional processes must be considered when assessing how local community structure will be affected by environmental change.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{BartholdWiesmeierBreueretal.2013,
  author    = {Barthold, Frauke Katrin and Wiesmeier, Martin and Breuer, L. and Frede, Hans-Georg and Wu, J. and Blank, F. Benjamin},
  title     = {Land use and climate control the spatial distribution of soil types in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia},
  series = {Journal of arid environments},
  volume    = {88},
  journal   = {Journal of arid environments},
  number    = {1},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {London},
  issn      = {0140-1963},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.jaridenv.2012.08.004},
  pages     = {194 -- 205},
  year      = {2013},
  abstract  = {The spatial distribution of soil types is controlled by a set of environmental factors such as climate, organisms, parent material and topography as well as time and space. A change of these factors will lead to a change in the spatial distribution of soil types. In this study, we use a digital soil mapping approach to improve our knowledge about major soil type distributing factors in the steppe regions of Inner Mongolia (China) which currently undergo tremendous environmental change, e.g. climate and land use change. We use Random Forests in an effort to map Reference Soil Groups according to the World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) in the Xilin River catchment. We benefit from the superior prediction capabilities of RF and additional interpretive results in order to identify the major environmental factors that control spatial patterns of soil types. The nine WRB soil groups that were identified and spatially predicted for the study area are Arenosol, Calcisol, Cambisol, Chernozem, Cryosol, Gleysol, Kastanozem, Phaeozem and Regosol. Model and prediction performances of the RF model are high with an Out-of-Bag error of 51.6\% for the model and a misclassification error for the predicted map of 28.9\%. The main controlling factors of soil type distribution are land use, a set of topographic variables, geology and climate. However, land use and climate are of major importance and topography and geology are of minor importance. The visualizations of the predictions, the variable importance measures as result of RF and the comparisons of these with the spatial distribution of the environmental factors delivered additional, quantitative information of these controlling factors and revealed that intensively grazed areas are subjected to soil degradation. However, most of the area is still governed by natural soil forming processes which are driven by climate, topography and geology. Most importantly though, our study revealed that a shift towards warmer temperatures and lower precipitation regimes will lead to a change of the spatial distribution of RSGs towards steppe soils that store less carbon, i.e. a decrease of spatial extent of Phaeozems and an increase of spatial extent of Chernozems and Kastanozems.},
  language  = {en}
}