Project description
Nature-based mechanisms to combat desertification
Resilience is the capacity of ecosystems to withstand disturbances, a crucial trait for adapting to climate change and increasing aridity. This is especially vital for drylands, where crossing aridity thresholds can lead to sudden, dramatic shifts. However, limited knowledge of resilience in these regions hampers efforts to restore and protect degraded ecosystems. The ERC-funded INERTIA project will combine long-term experiments, remote sensing and global field surveys to investigate resilience across ecosystems, with a focus on global aridity thresholds. It aims to better understand the complex nature of resilience, refine remote sensing techniques, identify critical drivers at various organisational levels and support ecosystem restoration in arid areas.
Objective
Resilience (the ability of ecosystems to withstand disturbances without losing its structural or functional properties) is crucial to confront changes imposed by climate change such as ongoing increases in aridity. This is especially relevant for drylands, which have been shown to exhibit abrupt changes in their structure and functioning once that certain aridity thresholds are crossed. However, we have very little understanding on the drivers and patterns of resilience around aridity thresholds, which hinders our ability to monitor, preserve and restore degraded ecosystems under climate change. Existing uncertainties arise from the complexity of studying resilience (which is multifaceted concept and operates at contrasting levels of organization of ecosystems), and from the lack of studies addressing the resilience of drylands around and across aridity thresholds. INERTIA will combine long-term experiments, remote sensing, multiple spatiotemporal scales and global field surveys to address all facets of resilience across contrasting levels of organization of ecosystems around and across global aridity thresholds. In particular, I aim to: i) evaluate the multi-faceted nature of resilience to boost remote sensing monitoring schemes, ii) unveil drivers of global resilience across levels of organization (from climatic to physiological drivers), specifically around aridity thresholds and iii) evaluate and improve our capacity to restore ecosystems across aridity thresholds. By doing so, INERTIA will provide cutting-edge advances in our understanding of resilience and its potential to monitor, evade and recover from abrupt shifts triggered by crossing aridity thresholds. The knowledge gained by INERTIA will underpin international initiatives aimed at mitigating global change and desertification or restoring degraded drylands and may open new research avenues on ecology of ecosystems at the edge of thresholds, a topic of increasing relevance due to ongoing climate change.
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.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
28040 Madrid
Spain