Periodic Reporting for period 1 - STOIKOS (Elemental Ecology: towards an element-based functional ecology)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-05-01 bis 2025-10-31
Recent evidence indicates that the elemental composition of organisms (i.e. the elementome) is a key driver of biodiversity and ecosystem function. As such, studying the elementome and its diversity has great potential for understanding current patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. STOIKOS will achieve an in-depth understanding of the interaction between elementomes and biodiversity in determining ecosystem functioning by introducing the concept of elemental diversity, and moving functional ecology from using functional traits to elementomes, an easy and universal way to compare all sort of organisms. To do this, STOIKOS will integrate data from observations, long-term monitoring sites, microcosm experiments and theoretical modelling to build the foundations of an elemental-based ecology.
Through a field campaign across Europe, STOIKOS will sample a wide range of organisms to build the STOIKOS database. This database will contain functional traits, elementomes and functioning of individual organisms, including plants, protists and animals. The STOIKOS database will detail measurements of functional traits and their elementomes (consisting of C and N concentration and their isotopes 13C and 15N, and P, K, Fe, Ca, Mg, Na, S, Cu, Zn, Mo, Co, and Hg). Additionally, the STOIKOS project will use microcosm experiments to collect high temporal resolution photosynthesis data from 20 bryophyte communities of contrasting species diversity. For each community, growth rates, functional traits, and their elementome will be determined.
STOIKOS will also coordinate with long-term and large-scale monitoring sites equipped with eddy covariance towers within FLUXNET and ICOS networks to compile a database containing elementomes, functional traits and biomass of the most abundant plant species across 20 forests and 10 shrublands in Europe. Biomass and elementome measurements will be analysed separately for leaves, branches, and main stems, and ecosystem elementomes will include the same measurements as for the STOIKOS database. Long-term data collected by the eddy covariance systems, including gross primary productivity and evapotranspiration, will be used to compute metrics of functional temporal complexity. Additionally, STOIKOS will synthesise forest inventory data to study how community-weighted elementomes and elemental diversity affect forest growth. Together, these large-scale monitoring and inventory data will allow us to elucidate and quantify the importance of the individual- and ecosystem-scale mechanisms that drive the relationship between elementomes, elemental diversity and ecosystem functioning.
Lastly, all the previously generated observational and experimental data will be synergistically combined through computer simulations and theoretical modelling to provide novel theoretical background on how elementomes and elemental diversity affect interactions amongst species. This will be the cornerstone for the future inclusion of elementomes and elemental diversity in global dynamic vegetation models to predict global changes in ecosystem functioning climate change.
Through a field campaign across Europe, STOIKOS will sample a wide range of organisms to build the STOIKOS database. This database will contain functional traits, elementomes and functioning of individual organisms, including plants, protists and animals. The STOIKOS database will detail measurements of functional traits and their elementomes (consisting of C and N concentration and their isotopes 13C and 15N, and P, K, Fe, Ca, Mg, Na, S, Cu, Zn, Mo, Co, and Hg). Additionally, the STOIKOS project will use microcosm experiments to collect high temporal resolution photosynthesis data from 20 bryophyte communities of contrasting species diversity. For each community, growth rates, functional traits, and their elementome will be determined.
STOIKOS will also coordinate with long-term and large-scale monitoring sites equipped with eddy covariance towers within FLUXNET and ICOS networks to compile a database containing elementomes, functional traits and biomass of the most abundant plant species across 20 forests and 10 shrublands in Europe. Biomass and elementome measurements will be analysed separately for leaves, branches, and main stems, and ecosystem elementomes will include the same measurements as for the STOIKOS database. Long-term data collected by the eddy covariance systems, including gross primary productivity and evapotranspiration, will be used to compute metrics of functional temporal complexity. Additionally, STOIKOS will synthesise forest inventory data to study how community-weighted elementomes and elemental diversity affect forest growth. Together, these large-scale monitoring and inventory data will allow us to elucidate and quantify the importance of the individual- and ecosystem-scale mechanisms that drive the relationship between elementomes, elemental diversity and ecosystem functioning.
Lastly, all the previously generated observational and experimental data will be synergistically combined through computer simulations and theoretical modelling to provide novel theoretical background on how elementomes and elemental diversity affect interactions amongst species. This will be the cornerstone for the future inclusion of elementomes and elemental diversity in global dynamic vegetation models to predict global changes in ecosystem functioning climate change.
The STOIKOS project has made substantial progress across its three primary objectives investigating elementomes and elemental diversity in ecosystem functioning. Under Objective 1, we established the comprehensive STOIKOS database incorporating detailed elemental profiles and functional trait data for diverse species including vascular plants, bryophytes, fungi, and bacteria. Extensive field campaigns across Catalonia and south-eastern and central Europe captured broad climatic and altitudinal gradients, whilst chronosequence studies in the Alt Pirineu Natural Park are examining elemental composition changes during ecological succession. We completed forest inventory analyses in Catalonia, resulting in our published research identifying the optimal set of leaf and aboveground tree elements predicting forest functioning. European-wide campaigns at ICOS/FLUXNET sites are linking community-level elemental diversity to ecosystem functioning using eddy covariance data. For Objective 2, we developed an innovative flow-through microcosm system enabling precise environmental control across multiple experimental units, generating high-temporal resolution productivity data from moss communities under varying species richness and environmental conditions. The first round of experiments have been successfully completed, and the data is currently being analysed. Objective 3 advances included implementing cellular automata models to simulate ecosystem dynamics responses to altered elementomes, alongside developing novel applications of chaos theory to carbon cycle dynamics which have already been published. Key outcomes include multiple publications, the Pius Font i Quer Award in Life Sciences and the Spanish National Research Award "Ángeles Alvariño" in Sciences and Technology of Natural Resources, both awarded to the PI of the project, and several conference presentations disseminating our findings.
The STOIKOS project has already introduced groundbreaking methodological innovations. Most significantly, we pioneered the application of correlation dimension from chaos theory to assess temporal complexity in ecosystem functioning—a technique never previously used in functional ecology. This methodology, detailed in our published article in Nature Communications with accompanying R package (to be submitted), provides unprecedented insights into nonlinear ecosystem dynamics. Our identification of optimal elemental sets for predicting forest functioning represents the first systematic exploration of elementome dimensionality, determining which elements provide meaningful ecological information versus noise. This study was published in Biogeosciences. Another study investigating the optimal elementome set and bryophyte photosynthesis is currently being reviewed in an international journal. The development of bryophyte-based aquatic microcosms as model systems enables precise tracking of elementome shifts under controlled treatments. The results of the first experiment have been analysed and will be submitted to an SCI journal soon. The results from the second set of experiments are being analysed at the moment. We are also close to publishing the first paper demonstrating a positive relationship between elemental diversity and ecosystem productivity in terrestrial ecosystems, suggesting a stronger effect than traditional metrics of biodiversity such as species richness or diversity. Our innovations bridge theoretical ecology, community ecology, and biogeochemistry in unprecedented ways. We found that the elemental composition of plants strongly influences photosynthesis across hundreds of species, whilst environmental dynamics play crucial roles in ecosystem temporal complexity. The STOIKOS database and methodological frameworks will be made publicly available through established repositories, ensuring broad accessibility. Further research is needed to scale these approaches globally and develop predictive models incorporating elemental diversity. The project's interdisciplinary nature and novel theoretical frameworks position it to fundamentally reshape understanding of ecosystem functioning through elemental ecology perspectives.