Woodiness and succulence of the Canary Islands flora

Aim: Oceanic islands possess unique floras with high proportions of endemic species. Island floras are expected to be severely affected by changing climatic conditions as species on islands have limited distribution ranges, small population sizes and face the constraints of insularity to track their climatic niches. We aimed to assess how ongoing climate change affects the range sizes of oceanic island plants, identifying species of particular conservation concern.
Location: Canary Islands, Spain.
Methods: We combined species occurrence data from single-island endemic, archipelago endemic and non-endemic native plant species of the Canary Islands with data on current and future climatic conditions. Bayesian Additive Regression Trees were used to assess the effect of climate change on species distributions; 71% (n = 502 species) of the native Canary Island species had models deemed good enough. To further assess how climate change affects plant functional strategies, we collected data on..., Occurrence data:
We used occurrence data from the Banco de Datos de Biodiversidad de Canarias, an open-access database, for single-island endemic (SIE; n = 325), archipelago endemic (AE; n = 234) and definitely non-endemic native (NEN; n = 149) extant seed plant species (excluding subspecies), in a raster of 500 m x 500 m grid cells covering the Canary Islands (https://www.biodiversidadcanarias.es/biota/) [accessed 14/03/2022]. The database includes all species listed in the checklist of the Banco de Datos de Biodiversidad de Canarias, across 31,628 grid cell assemblages. Species range in occurrence from 1 to 4,466 cells. We only retrieved occurrences for which a species has been certainly observed or collected (precision level 1 of four levels). The Banco de Datos de Biodiversidad de Canarias provides presence-only information that is spatially biased by sampling effort (Hortal et al., 2007). However, the sampling bias of SIEs, AEs, and NENs is less than for species overall because stu...,