SHIFT: migration potential of suitable habitats for eastern United States trees

This data publication includes colonization likelihoods of modeled habitat suitability for 121 eastern United States trees species under 1981-2010 climate conditions and projected future conditions (2070-2099) created using a statistical modeling approach that correlates mean importance values (i.e., relative abundance) to environmental data. Migration potential is simulated by computing colonization likelihoods using current species relative abundance, historical migration rates, current habitat fragmentation, and a search distance function to simulate long distance migration. End of century migration potential is achieved both inside and beyond the current range by matching future projections of habitat suitability from the DISTRIB-II model based on the length of time until reproductive maturity of individual tree species. End of century colonization likelihoods were intersected with future projections of DISTRIB-II habitat suitability models under representative concentration pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5 using the average habitat quality among three general circulation model (GCM) scenarios: NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM4), NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Coupled Model 3 (GFDL CM3), and Met Office Hadley Global Environment Model 2 - Earth System (HadGEM2 - ES). The resulting raster data provide an estimate of individual species migration potential (occupied, none, low, medium, high) by the end of the century based on modeled habitat suitability (low, medium, high).
Knowing where suitable habitat for a species may exists and how likely species are able to migrate to newly suitable habitats in the future as a result of changing climatic conditions allows resource managers to plan for potential future conditions.
For more information about these data, see Iverson et al. (2019; https://doi.org/10.3390/f10110989) and Peters et al. (2019; https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.5445). Additional information and products are available at https://doi.org/10.2737/Climate-Change-Tree-Atlas-v4. These data were published on 05/24/2024. On 06/26/2024, metadata was updated to include the complete citation for a newly published data package referenced.