Jack pine fitness under current and future climate

Abstract

Climate change has the potential to drastically alter the functioning of Canada’s forests and the species that live there. The importance of understanding patterns of adaptive variation in relation to climate is imperative to predict how populations will react to climate change. Site transfer functions were used to identify optimal seed sources for northern, central and southern planting locations under current climate while population response functions were used to identify optimal climate conditions for individual provenances e used to determine which climatic factors most strongly affect Optimal climate values were compared to current and predicted future climate conditions to predict potential changes to volume growth under climate change. Minimum winter temperatures were the strongest predictors of volume growth when multiple seed sources were compared for a given test locality (transfer functions) while average summer precipitation was the strongest predictor of volume growth for individual provenances planted at multiple test locations (response functions). Understanding how jack pine performance is related to climatic factors is important when predicting future outcomes for the species under changing climatic conditions. Research such as this can be further used to build more accurate prediction models of how the growth of jack pine will be affected in the future.