Project description
Can wildlife survive the heat?
As global temperatures rise, heatwaves are placing increasing pressure on animal populations – reducing fertility, reducing lifespans, and threatening biodiversity. Yet, scientists still lack vital knowledge about how animals cope with extreme heat and whether they can adapt in time. The ERC-funded HotLife project aims to change that. Focusing on birds, which are particularly vulnerable to heat-induced mass deaths, HotLife will explore how heat tolerance works, whether it is inherited, and if short-term plasticity hinders long-term evolutionary rescue. Using cutting-edge physiological and genetic tools, the project will uncover if nature is already selecting for heat survival. By revealing how, why, and when animals fail to survive in the heat, HotLife hopes to help wildlife weather a rapidly warming world.
Objective
Global warming and heatwaves – hallmarks of climate change that are expected to worsen in the 21st century – diminish reproductive success and cause excess mortality in wild and domesticated animal populations. Yet, we still have sub-standard knowledge of almost all fundamental traits that medi-ate success or failure under climate change, and, for most animals, there are no data on the extent to which plasticity, local adaptation, or evolutionary change can alleviate the stress imposed by a hotter world. Collectively, therefore, the research field is at status quo. To mitigate this situation, HotLife will leverage my previous phenomenological studies on ontogenetic priming and plasticity of thermoregulatory capacity to generate novel knowledge on when and why animals fail in the heat, and whether plastic or evolutionary responses may render failure a less likely outcome in the future.
The main outcomes of HotLife will reveal:
1) How heat tolerance manifests, how much it can evolve, and whether plasticity halts evolutionary rescue;
2) Whether climate warming and climatic extremes directly or indirectly cuts life expectancy short; and
3) If the physiological basis for heat tolerance is inherited in the wild and if it is already being selected upon
I will achieve these ambitious goals by combining state-of-the-art thermal and sub-cellular physiology with intricate genomic techniques and powerful heritability analyses in captive and wild bird models – the endotherm group for which heat-induced mass mortality is most frequently reported. HotLife goes beyond the state-of-the-art, by i) bridging crucial knowledge gaps between heat failure in birds, its physiological basis, and its links to fitness and survival; ii) addressing the potential for rescue by plasticity or evolution from these effects; and iii) uncovering evidence for local adaptation and heritability of heat tolerance in the wild.
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.
- social sciences sociology demography mortality
- medical and health sciences basic medicine physiology
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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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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
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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22100 Lund
Sweden
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