Project description
Protecting biodiversity in a stochastic world
The global richness of plant and animal species represents a tremendous diversity of life histories that have been optimised through evolutionary time by environmental filtering operating on genetic differences among individuals and species. However, anthropogenic environmental changes may push these species out of their evolved life-history optima. There is an urgent need to understand and predict how environmental stochasticity may affect life histories and their cascading effects on global biodiversity. The EU-funded MaxPersist project will develop new theoretical advances to understand how life-history strategies may respond to climatic variation and use these advancements, alongside high-resolution, global data, to forecast how natural populations of hundreds of animal and plant species may persist in the face of increasing environmental perturbations worldwide.
Objective
"The vast richness of plant and animal species worldwide represents also a tremendous diversity of life histories (i.e. key moments along a species life cycle, such as age at maturity or death). These extant life histories have been optimised through evolutionary time by environmental filtering operating on genetic differences among individuals and species. However, anthropogenic environmental changes (e.g. climate change, habitat degradation) may push plant and animal species out of their evolved life-history opima. Thus, there is an urgent need to understand and predict how environmental stochasticity (increased amplitude and fluctuation) may affect life histories and their cascading effects on global biodiversity. This is the overarching goal of MaxPersist, where I will develop new theoretical advances to thoroughly understand how life-history strategies may respond to climatic variation, and use these advancements, alongside high-resolution, global data, to forecast how natural populations of hundreds of animal and plant species may persist in the face of increasing environmental perturbations worldwide. I have developed a network of world-leading scientists to contribute to the development of theoretic advances including assimilation of density-dependence, small noise assumptions, and adaptation of second-derivative of population growth rate to stochastic environments. MaxPersist will offer a comprehensive and innovative tool kit to enable realistic and effective conservation plans, useful especially for endangered species (contributing to UN Sustainable Development Goal #15), the 5th Target of the EU Biodiversity Strategy, to sustainable exploitation of harvested species and to the IUCN Red list. The deliverables of MaxPersist will be of great interest and use to the scientific community and to the public, raising the awareness of the consequences that climate change may have on natural populations and generating knowledge to protect biodiversity."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
OX1 2JD Oxford
United Kingdom