Soil properties constrain predicted poleward migration of plants under climate change

Abstract

Summary Many plant species are predicted to migrate poleward in response to climate change. Species distribution models (SDMs) have been widely used to quantify future suitable habitats, but they often neglect soil properties, despite the importance of soil for plant fitness. As soil properties often change along latitudinal gradients, higher‐latitude soils might be more or less suitable than average conditions within the current ranges of species, thereby accelerating or slowing potential poleward migration. In this study, we built three SDMs – one with only climate predictors, one with only soil predictors, and one with both – for each of 1870 plant species in Eastern North America, in order to investigate the relative importance of soil properties in determining plant distributions and poleward shifts under climate change. While climate variables were the most important predictors, soil properties also had a substantial influence on continental‐scale plant distributions. Under future climate scenarios, models including soil predicted much smaller northward shifts in distributions than climate‐only models (c. 40% reduction). Our findings strongly suggest that high‐latitude soils are likely to impede ongoing plant migration, and they highlight the necessity of incorporating soil properties into models and predictions for plant distributions and migration under environmental change.