The paper “Divergence of species responses to climate change,” coauthored by Kevin Potter, a faculty member in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University, has been awarded the 2019 W.S. Cooper Award by the Ecological Society of America.
The award is given annually to an outstanding publication in the field of geobotany, physiographic ecology, plant succession, or the distribution of plants along environmental gradients. In the paper, published in the May 2017 issue of Science Advances, Potter and colleagues from the Natural Resources Spatial Analysis Lab at Purdue University and the Southern Research Station analyzed extensive data on 86 tree species in the eastern United States and found that most trees have been shifting their ranges westward or northward in response to temperature and precipitation changes.
The authors of the paper will be honored at the annual Ecological Society of America meeting this August in Louisville, Kentucky.
The paper was ranked number 59 on the list of top science stories in 2018 by Discover magazine.
For more information, see the announcement from the Ecological Society of America, the article in Discover magazine, and this news item and this blog posting from the U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station.
April 17, 2019
