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Rainfall and temperature affect tree species distribution in Ghana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2014

Lucy Amissah ,
Godefridus M. J. Mohren ,
Frans Bongers ,
William D. Hawthorne  and
Lourens Poorter
Lucy Amissah*
Affiliation:
Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, the Netherlands CSIR-Forestry Research Institute of Ghana, P.O. Box UP63, KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana
Godefridus M. J. Mohren
Affiliation:
Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, the Netherlands
Frans Bongers
Affiliation:
Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, the Netherlands
William D. Hawthorne
Affiliation:
Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3RB, UK
Lourens Poorter
Affiliation:
Forest Ecology and Forest Management Group, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 47, 6700 AA, Wageningen, the Netherlands
*
1Corresponding author. Email: lucy.amissah@wur.nl
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Abstract:

We evaluated the relative importance of annual rainfall, temperature and their seasonality to tree species distribution in Ghana. We used species presence/absence data from 2505 1-ha plots systematically distributed over Ghana's forests. Logistic regression was used to determine species responses to four climatic variables generated from the Worldclim database. The distribution of 95% of 20 species was significantly associated with annual rainfall, 60% with rainfall seasonality, 45% with isothermality and 40% with temperature seasonality. Annual rainfall explained on average most of the variation (17%, range = 0.5–52%) in species distribution, followed by rainfall seasonality 5% (range = 0.5–27%), isothermality 4% (range = 0.8–24%) and temperature seasonality 1% (range = 0.4–4.5%). Our results suggest that, out of the climatic variables investigated, rainfall is the main factor determining tree species distribution in Ghana; temperature also influences the distribution of a number of species, although it explains much less of the variation. The reduction in annual rainfall that prevailing climate-change scenarios predict for the region will result in a shift in the distribution of most species, whereas the predicted increase in temperature variation is likely to have little effect.

Keywords

climatedistributiondroughtplant-climate interactionsspecies response curvestemperaturetropical forest
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Tropical Ecology , Volume 30 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 435 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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