Projection of asymmetric boundary shifts along latitude gradient for Chinese trees under climate change

Climate change is causing widespread boundary shifts of terrestrial plants. However, current works mainly focus on leading edges, but seldom takes a comparative study of trailing and leading edge shifts. Here, the shifts of Chinese trees were simulated along the leading and trailing edges under the maximum representative concentration path (RCP8.5). The results show that Chinese trees likely exhibit a variety of asymmetric boundary shift pattern. Synchronous northward (62.7%) dominant the trade off shift between leading and trailing edge and temperature factors have a significant positive correlation with the boundary shift distance. The other 37.3% species show a southward shift for one or two edges and this pattern could be mainly the comprehensive interaction of heat, low temperature, available water and topographic factors. The study suggest that simple view of polarward shift for leading and trailing edges is not suitable for the explanation of tree migration in China.