Objective
A recent fingerprint of climate change is the increasing persistence of weather patterns, which
implies that average weather is making way for anomalously long periods of dry or wet
meteorological conditions. This shift in climate regimes is likely to negative affect ecosystem
functioning, yet scientific knowledge on this is still scarce as much research has focused on
unidirectional changes (e.g. only an increase in dry periods). In the current project, we will fill part of
this knowledge gap by studying impacts of increasingly persistent weather in agricultural grasslands.
Using a state-of-the-art experimental platform, we will test how a sequence of dry, wet, or
alternating dry and wet growing seasons affects grasslands relevant in Flanders, and whether plant
community composition (which grasses are present in which numbers) can modulate the outcome.
Furthermore, we will evaluate the importance of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in potentially
altering impacts of increasingly persistent precipitation regimes, identifying AMF colonization in
relation to plant performance and how AMF regulate biochemical and molecular pathways in different
grassland species. The UN has recently called for more attention for nature-based solutions in the
fight against negative climate change impacts. This project contributes to that by elucidating the
importance of plant community composition and AMF in safeguarding grassland ecosystem
functioning under increasingly persistent weather.
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
2000 Antwerpen
Belgium