A Palaeoenvironmental Investigation of Amazonian Lowland Sensitivity to Climatic Drivers Using Pollen-based Modelling Approaches

Descripción del proyecto

Cómo responden las plantas amazónicas a los cambios climáticos

La Amazonia es vital para la biodiversidad y la lucha contra el cambio climático, pero se enfrenta al peligro de las actividades humanas y el calentamiento global. A pesar de su importancia, comprender la sensibilidad de las plantas amazónicas a las variaciones de temperatura y precipitaciones sigue constituyendo un reto. El polen fósil ofrece pistas sobre la dinámica de los ecosistemas en el pasado; sin embargo, determinar su relación con los fenómenos climáticos de esta diversa región ha sido difícil debido a la falta de datos. En el proyecto PALOMA, que cuenta con el apoyo de las acciones Marie Skłodowska-Curie, se estudiarán las respuestas de la vegetación amazónica al cambio climático en Ecuador y Perú a través de un innovador método de modelización basado en el polen. El objetivo general del proyecto es comprender cómo responde la vegetación amazónica a los cambios climáticos.

Objetivo

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.