Soil Effects on Vegetation Dynamics Under Climate Change

Ming Ni, Mark Vellend4

While predictive models of contemporary vegetation change often emphasize climate as the main driver, soil properties are increasingly recognized as critical mediators. This review synthesizes evidence on climate-soil interactions from diverse fields (e.g., paleobiology, species distribution modelling, and plant-soil feedbacks) across multiple scales. We propose a framework capturing how soil–climate correlations and species’ niches shape vegetation change, revealing several important mechanisms of climate-soil interactions. At local scales, communities restricted to unusual soils often resist thermophilization, and high soil heterogeneity can further buffer climate impacts. However, emerging soil–climate combinations may generate novel ecosystems. At biogeographical scales, soils constrain species’ range limits and migration rates, yet most evidence comes from temperate regions. For tropical-to-temperate transitions, we predict that soils might instead accelerate migration, based on greater soil fertility in the temperate zone. The distributions and climate sensitivities of soil microbes may not align with those of plants, posing challenges for predicting plant range shifts. Mechanistic species distribution models linking traits and demographic processes to soil properties offer a promising path to improve predictions. Our synthesis shows that understanding soil-vegetation-climate interactions is essential for accurate predictions of future plant distributions, community composition, and extinction risk in a changing climate.