Project description
Insect resilience to extreme heat
Global warming is driving an increase in extreme heat events, exemplified by this year’s European heatwave. These thermal extremes challenge insects, whose body temperatures rise along with their environments. Insects are essential to terrestrial ecosystems, but with alarming population declines, understanding their adaptability to heat stress has become critical. The ERC-funded IGNITE project seeks to answer a pressing question: Can insects survive the intensifying heatwaves? Using advanced 3D thermal imaging, the project will examine how microclimatic variations and behavioural thermoregulation impact insect survival. The team will also create a high-resolution climate model to predict future heatwaves and test ant thermal plasticity, revealing broader implications for ecosystem functions such as seed dispersal and biodiversity.
Objective
Global warming will increase the frequency of extreme heat events, exemplified by this years European heatwave. These thermal extremes pose challenges to insects, who play an indispensable role in terrestrial ecosystems, and whose body temperatures rise with habitat temperatures. Given the alarming trend of global insect declines, it is essential to understand their adaptability in the face of rising temperatures. IGNITE aims to answer one of the most urgent questions in ecology todayWill insects be able to survive the upcoming heat stress?
To answer this question, we will test insects resilience to thermal extremes using an interdisciplinary approach that integrates insect physiological and behavioral responses with relevant micro- and macro-climates. Using state-of-the-art 3D thermal imaging of the habitat, we will determine how microclimatic heterogeneity combined with insect behavioral thermoregulation governs insect survival to extreme heat. While such microclimatic insights are pivotal, predicting long-term changes requires a macroclimatic perspective. Thus, we will develop a high-resolution climatic model of surface temperatures to forecast heatwave frequency and intensity on Mediterranean islands. We will test insects thermal plasticity potential with novel reciprocal transplant experiments in both the field and laboratory. We will use ants as model insects, due to their global distribution and ecological importance. Under temperature extremes projected by the macroclimatic model, we will determine ant thermal plasticity and its ramifications on ecosystem functions such as seed dispersal, plant productivity, and biodiversity.
IGNITE integrates findings from climatology, behavioral ecology, and ecophysiology to understand insect resilience to temperature increases and cascading effects on ecosystems. By doing so it will pioneer global change biology research in the Mediterranean Region using islands as natural laboratories to study global warming.
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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. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences economics and business economics production economics productivity
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology ecosystems
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences atmospheric sciences climatology
- natural sciences biological sciences zoology entomology
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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10000 Zagreb
Croatia
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