Descrizione del progetto
Aumentare la resilienza degli ecosistemi alle soglie climatiche
Le soglie critiche rappresentano un problema cruciale nella lotta contro i cambiamenti climatici. Questi punti emergono quando i danni agli ecosistemi superano un limite di importanza vitale, comportando alterazioni profonde e irreversibili. Le attività umane sono spesso responsabili di tali danni, che si traducono in vari impatti sul pianeta tra cui quelli annoverati nell’ambito dei cambiamenti climatici. Tuttavia, recenti ricerche hanno confermato il fatto che gli ecosistemi sottoposti a stress tendono a sviluppare modelli spaziali, come la vegetazione, che rafforzano in modo significativo la loro capacità di resistere ai punti critici e di riprendersi dai relativi danni. Il progetto Resilience, finanziato dal CER, studia come prevenire le soglie critiche degli ecosistemi attraverso processi strutturali e modelli spaziali. Il progetto integrerà diversi ambiti, quali l’ecologia, la matematica e la scienza dei dati, per promuovere una risposta dinamica alle minacce poste dai cambiamenti climatici.
Obiettivo
There is an urgent need to understand the catastrophic effects that global environmental and climate change can have on the Earth, its system components and ecosystems. One area of critical concern is the imminent high-impact, abrupt and irreversible tipping of ecosystems. Recent discoveries indicate that tipping could be evaded and even reversed in ecosystems through spatial pattern formation of vegetation, thereby creating pathways of resilience. Many undiscovered pathways of resilience through spatial pattern formation could exist for tipping-prone ecosystems. This resilience could be even enhanced by the unexplored connection between spatial pattern formation and community assembly. The aim of RESILIENCE is to fundamentally advance our understanding and predictions of tipping and critical transitions in ecosystems and reveal how these can be evaded and even reversed through spatial pattern formation.
The RESILIENCE team consists of field-leading and complementary PI’s and is capable of addressing all aspects of this overarching project, linking theory and observation, spanning the fields of ecology, physics and mathematics. RESILIENCE will develop a new theory for emerging resilience through spatial pattern formation and link this with real tipping-prone biomes undergoing accelerating global change: savanna and tundra. Central to our theoretical approach is the novel mathematical connection between the origin of the formation of patterns and their resilience once they emerged. Our empirical approach will include the analysis of existing and new data from in situ observations and drone and satellite-based remote sensing. Our research will reveal which conditions and spatial patterns lead to the evasion and even reversal of tipping. Identifying these conditions and patterns will also expose how human interventions can prevent or reverse tipping and uncover that tipping-prone ecosystems could be much more resilient than currently thought.
Campo scientifico
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringremote sensing
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringroboticsautonomous robotsdrones
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesmathematics
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
HORIZON-ERC-SYG - HORIZON ERC Synergy GrantsIstituzione ospitante
3584 CS Utrecht
Paesi Bassi