Skip to main content
Dryad

Data from: Climatic resilience after extreme drought in Mediterranean shrubland plant communities

Díaz Borrego, Raquel1; Pérez Navarro, María Ángeles2

Published Jun 30, 2025 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dncjsxm8s

Data files

Abstract

Extreme climatic events are increasing with climate change, producing changes in communities climatic characterization. So, mismatches between climatic conditions inferred from species requirements (Community Inferred Climate, CIC) and macroclimate (climatic disequilibrium, CD) may change with extreme climatic events. Climatic resilience is defined as the ability to maintain or recover community climatic characteristics, regardless of species identity, after disturbance or stress. We evaluated the dynamics of plant community climatic characterization in Mediterranean shrublands that experienced a drought event, considering CIC and CD. CIC was calculated by averaging species’ climatic niche centroids, weighted by species' relative abundances, in the multivariate environmental space obtained from the climate of the species' geographical occurrence. CD was estimated as Euclidean distance in this space between the observed macroclimate and CIC. Climatic resistance was inferred by the distance between pre-drought and drought CIC, climatic resilience by the distance between pre-drought and post-drought CIC, and relative climatic resilience by the interaction between both distances. We found a significant reduction in community CD after drought, with CIC becoming more arid, likely due to environmental filtering of those species with wetter distributions. Communities with less pre-drought CD showed higher climatic resistance, but pre-drought CD did not explain climatic resilience. Communities with more arid CIC exhibited high climatic resilience regardless of drought impact (high relative climatic resilience), except for those with the most arid CIC, which suffered delayed die-off. Communities with less arid CIC showed low relative climatic resilience, as their resilience was associated with high resistance. The study highlights community impacts by extreme droughts through filtering of species distributed in more humid climates when their populations grow close to the arid edge. This produces changes in CD, whose resilience is determined by CIC, pre-drought CD, and drought impact in terms of CIC change.