Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English en
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
Content archived on 2024-06-16

Modern and past grass-dominated biomes distribution recorded by phytoliths and stable carbon isotopes; calibration and modelling

Objective

Nowadays grasslands are the most widespread continental floral associations. They were more abundant than today during the different past glaciations. Although proxy indicators of past environments can be derived from fossil records, the reconstruction of grass-dominated biomes is difficult as pollen cannot distinguish between grass subfamilies. The main objective of this project is focused on the Quaternary dynamics of grass-dominated biomes in South America and Colombia in particular, in order to better u nderstand the relationships between climate change and vegetation dynamics (e.g. C3/C4 grass distribution) in tropical areas. For this purpose, quantitative data and vegetation models will be coupled. Calibration of statistical relationships between modern phytolith assemblages, stable carbon isotopic signatures of modern soil derived organic carbon, botanical statements for several grassland biomes and climate data will be performed. Regression equations between climate parameters, the quantitative phytoli th and d13C proxy of C3/C4 grasslands will be estimated. In a second stage, we will apply the calibrated relationships to several soil profiles from several elevation transects where the change in C3/C4 grass dominance over the last 10,000 years has been r ecorded. Finally, the reconstructed vegetation and climate parameters will be compared with several scenarios derived from two vegetation models (BIOME 3 and LPJ-GUESS). This process of data-model comparison will include investigating changes in precipitat ion, temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The comparison between simulation and data enables in turn, by inversion of the model, to reconstruct the parameters best as coherent as possible with the data. The application and development of the phy tolith proxy in tropical South America will also allow comparison with recent synthesis studies that have primarily focused on pollen data alone.

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.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Keywords

Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)

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.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP6-2004-MOBILITY-5
See other projects for this call

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.

EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European Fellowships

Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER
EU contribution
No data
Total cost

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.

No data
My booklet 0 0