Project description
Seeds on the edge of change
Alpine ecosystems offer a glimpse into how climate change will affect plant life, as they are already warming faster than the global average. The critical life stage of seeds (their ability to grow into adult plants) is threatened by rising temperatures, making these regions especially vulnerable. Yet seed ecology lacks the standardised data and tools that have advanced other areas of plant science. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SEEDTRAITS project will develop a new seed ecology framework, publish a standardised seed trait handbook, and create the first publicly accessible alpine seed trait database. These resources will help predict which plant species are most likely to survive in a warming climate.
Objective
To improve predictions of how plants may persist or disappear from ecosystems, we urgently need improved understanding of how climate change affects a critical and vulnerable plant life-history stage and transition–seeds and seed recruitment. Seed ecology is a growing discipline, yet it lacks some of the recent standardised methods and centralised resources of other plant sciences, such as the core databases and methodological handbooks that have spurred plant functional trait innovation since the early 2000s.
Alpine areas can provide a glimpse of our future under climate change because they are warming faster than global averages and because alpine ecosystems are temperature-limited and hence more vulnerable to warming. Long-term warming experiments demonstrate that this vulnerability can alter vegetation structure, which in turn may change vegetation function, particularly carbon cycling. To predict which plants will persist, we need better data and frameworks for understanding how seeds and seed recruitment in the alpine respond to warmer climates.
I will (1) publish a standardised handbook of core seed trait measurements, (2) collect new trait data from seed collections and harmonise existing datasets to form a publicly accessible alpine seed trait database, (3) establish a functional trait-based framework of seed ecology, and (4) experimentally test how seeds respond to warming as a demonstration of how these new resources can rapidly expand our understanding of climate change effects on seed ecology.
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. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences computer and information sciences databases
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology ecosystems
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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.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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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-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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5020 Bergen
Norway
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