Climate change forces plant populations to adjust their distribution to stay in their potential climatic niche, adapt to the novel climatic conditions, or suffer population declines and - in the worst case - extinction. Long-term records are needed to understand how climate change affects long-lived organisms such as trees, and to develop management strategies to maintain ecosystem services. Since existing research techniques cannot resolve population-level dynamics in the past, we are using a novel, holistic approach to study past climate-driven range shifts by combining paleoecological methods with the analysis of ancient DNA (aDNA) and dynamic vegetation modelling.
