Project description
A new way to forecast forest futures
Forests play a crucial role in supporting biodiversity and providing essential services for human well-being. However, climate change is pushing trees beyond their native ranges, while non-native species are spreading rapidly. Current models struggle to predict how forest communities will respond to these changes. This lack of reliable forecasts hinders forest management. In this context, the ERC-funded project MODFORGE will fill this gap by creating a new modelling approach that considers how groups of species interact with their environment. By incorporating functional traits and abiotic factors, this project will analyse forest data from North America. The goal is to predict how forest communities will change, helping managers foster resilient ecosystems.
Objective
Forests encompass enormous biodiversity and provide a wealth of ecosystem services responsible for the health, well-being, and livelihoods of humans worldwide. As the climate changes, trees are expected to experience unique climate conditions far exceeding their native rangesa situation compounded by the proliferation of non-native species worldwide. Yet there remain few approaches for reliably projecting how forests will change over the coming century, in part because current models struggle to predict how groups of species will respond. The goal of this project is to overcome these limitations by pioneering a fundamentally new modelling approach to forecasting how communitiesrather than single specieswill respond to the twin threats of climate change and invasive species. To do this, the proposed work will incorporate a functional and abiotic backbone into a theoretical model of community-level coexistence, overcoming the key limitation of traditional species distribution models. By applying this model to high-resolution forest inventory data, we will quantify how species' traits interact with abiotic conditions, management history, and disturbance regimes to govern the composition and resilience of forests across North America. As a result, this approach will allow us to identify: (1) how functional traits shape forest community composition, (2) how abiotic conditions affect these relationships, (3) how management history, disturbance, and extreme events mediate co-occurrence, (4) how forest communities will change over the coming decades, (5) how native and non-native species' ranges will respond, and (6) the cascading effects on biodiversity and ecosystem function. By providing robust projections of forest change across North America, these results will directly inform management efforts to foster resilient forests, while also pioneering a new generation of models for understanding how ecosystems will respond to environmental change.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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.
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.
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
WC1E 6BT LONDON
United Kingdom
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.