Evergreen Broad-Leaved Forests in Japan and Eastern North America: Vegetation Shift under Climatic Warming

Evergreen broad-leaved forests include “laurel” forests, evergreen Fagaceae forests, tropical and temperate rainforests, and some nonFagaceae sclerophyll forests. Laurel forests are especially well developed in humid warm-temperate to subtropical areas of East Asia and occur topogenically (moist/wet depressions) in the sandy, drier coastal plain of the southeastern USA. Evergreen Fagaceae forests also occur in both regions, but with more mesomorphic, laurophyll character in East Asia and more semi-sclerophyll character in the southeastern USA. Both warm-temperate regions have secondary forests which are deciduous and more closely related to the adjacent typical-temperate deciduous forests. Under global warming (even without drying), weedy and other highly mobile species from warmer areas can be expected to invade northward. Species of the warm-temperate evergreen broad-leaved forests, however, may also expand northward, invading the adjacent deciduous forest regions. In Japan, Quercus myrsinaefolia has recently expanded inland, but a relationship to climatic warming has not yet been verified. In the southeastern USA, no such northward or inland expansion has been documented, but this could be related to a substrate discontinuity and/or to the more erratic nature of the North American climatic limit for evergreens. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.