Project description
How Amazonian plants respond to climate changes
Vital for biodiversity and fighting climate change, the Amazon faces danger from humans and global warming. Despite its importance, understanding the sensitivity of Amazonian plants to temperature and precipitation variations remains a challenge. Fossil pollen holds clues to past ecosystem dynamics, yet making connections to climatic events in this diverse region has been elusive due to insufficient data. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, the PALOMA project will study Amazonian vegetation response to climate change through innovative pollen-based modelling in Ecuador and Peru. The project’s overall aim is to understand how Amazonian vegetation responds to climate shifts.
Objective
The Amazon is one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems and our greatest carbon-sink, but human activity and climate change are posing severe threats to its existence. We are still a long way away from knowing how sensitive plants in the Amazon really are to variations in temperature and precipitation. One way we can understand this is by looking at fossil pollen accumulated over thousands of years, which can be used to reconstruct what the forests looked like over time and how they changed. In the context of Amazonia, so far there hasn’t been a way to connect changes in the pollen assemblages with climatic events because the forests in this region are diverse and many areas respond differently to environmental factors, and there is not enough data to allow comparisons between sites. To understand the sensitivity of Amazonia to climate change, we aim to use pollen-based modelling to reconstruct changes in temperature, precipitation and seasonality in the lowlands of Ecuador and Peru. This will be achieved by collecting modern pollen samples and gathering other existing datasets from collaborators, as well as modern climate data recovered from meteorological stations. We will use these datasets to calibrate key existing fossil pollen records from the region thereby enabling the reconstruction of palaeoclimatic parameters through the use of ‘transfer functions’. By improving our database of modern pollen for the lowlands of Amazonia and applying novel modelling techniques, we aim to provide new knowledge about ecological tipping points, plant responses to abrupt changes, effects on population abundance and structure and lags in response to climate. This project represents a key advancement not only to the field of tropical palaeoecology, shedding light on the response of vegetation dynamics to climate change for a region where this is still so mysterious, but it also represents a major contribution to the conservation of a globally important biome.
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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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
28006 Madrid
Spain