ClimPlant: Realized climatic niches of vascular plants in European forest understoreys

Abstract

Detailed knowledge on the climatic tolerances of species is crucial to understand, quantify and predict the impact of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, quantitative data are limited; often, only expert-based qualitative estimates are available. With the ClimPlant database, we capitalize on the link between species distribution ranges and macroclimate to infer the realized climatic niches of 968 European forest plant species.