Project description
How plants made Earth habitable
The ERC-funded TERRAFORM project will study how plants made our planet habitable over millions of years. Specifically, it will explore plant life and the evolution of plant characteristics or ‘traits’ over the past 300 million years and how these influenced large scale processes, such as the hydrological cycle and weathering. The project will bring together concepts and data sources from modern-day ecology, paleo-Earth weathering and decomposition experiments, climate modelling and high resolution analyses of fossil plants. It will quantify land plants’ impact on the carbon, nutrient and hydrological cycles in deep time. The findings will help scientists better understand biosphere impacts on Earth today.
Objective
TERRAFORM will mark a step-change in the investigation of biosphere impacts on the Earth system. It will integrate concepts and rich data sources from contemporary global trait ecology with novel simulated paleo-Earth weathering/decomposition experiments and high-resolution analyses of fossil plant paleotrait data to quantify the terrestrial biosphere’s impact on the carbon, nutrient and hydrological cycles in deep-time. The focus on extensive fossil plant archives spanning three episodes of major environmental and biotic change [Pennsylvanian-Permian glacial interglacial cycles; the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction; Cretaceous OAEs] will yield insights on plant responses to and effect on other components of the Earth system. TERRAFORM will develop new paleo-trait proxies for fossil plants. TERRAFORM will improve the parameterization and performance of weathering and terrestrial ecosystem models. Ultimately, TERRAFORM will contribute to the discovery of how plants TERRAFORMed the Earth, how plant functional traits evolved over the past 300 million years and it will establish a new methodological framework to extract the full untapped potential data resources from fossil plants. TERRAFORM will increase literacy in Earth System Science among a non-traditional audience through an embedded artist-in-residence programme.
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Funding Scheme
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantHost institution
D02 CX56 DUBLIN 2
Ireland