Project description
Exploring ecosystem fragility amid climate crises
Our world’s ecosystems are deteriorating at an alarming pace due to relentless climate change. This crisis imperils the essential services these ecosystems provide to humanity. Yet the intricate web of these ecosystems makes predicting their fragility a formidable challenge. Despite significant strides in this field, key knowledge gaps persist, making it difficult to predict transitions. With the backing of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the FRAGILEPRINTS project will address these abrupt transitions. Specifically, it aims to uncover the ‘fingerprints’ of ecosystem fragility, common indicators present across ecosystems, using innovative interdisciplinary methods. This project holds the promise of a predictive tool vital for prioritising conservation efforts, mapping ecosystem fragility and restoring ecosystems in peril.
Objective
Ecosystems are deteriorating at unprecedented rate. Climate change is threatening their functioning and the vital services they provide to human societies, imposing an urgent need to understand how they are coping with and reacting to global change. The complexity of ecosystems, however, makes predicting their fragility a difficult endeavor. FRAGILEPRINTS: Identifying fingerprints of fragility in complex ecosystems focuses on a critical scenario in ecosystem degradation: large and abrupt transitions following gradual environmental changes, observed across ecosystems worldwide. Despite important progresses, key knowledge gaps remain in our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning these transitions, making them notoriously difficult to predict. Current research relates them to the presence of Multiple Stable States (MSS), with small perturbations able to induce large shifts from healthy, species-rich communities towards deteriorated ecosystem states. Understanding of MSS, however, is based on simple models that largely ignore the role of species diversity and interaction complexity, highlighting an extremely relevant gap in our capacity to uncover potential abrupt transitions in species-rich ecosystems. To address this gap, FRAGILEPRINTS will investigate the emergence of MSS in complex ecosystems by combining a novel bottom-up and top-down interdisciplinary approach: increasing complexity in few-species MSS models and adding structure to random high-dimensional complex networks. The combination of the two, each applying mathematical models and numerical simulations confronted with experiments and whole-ecosystem data, will allow the identification of fingerprints of ecosystem fragility: conditions, common across ecosystems, related to the presence of MSS and potential abrupt transitions. These results will be applied to generate a predictive tool with utility in prioritizing areas for conservation, mapping ecosystem fragility or restoring degraded ecosystems.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
75794 Paris
France