Objective
Environmental change poses a major threat to the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services in this century. Management strategies that counteract this threat need to be based on forecasts of the impact of environmental change (changes in land use and climate, biological invasions, nutrient enrichment, etc.) on ecological systems at various hierarchical levels (populations, communities and ecosystems). Mathematical models are indispensable tools for the development of such ecological forecasts. However, most models ignore the hierarchical feedbacks between the dynamics of communities, populations and genotypes that critically affect the response of ecological systems to environmental change.
FEMMES aims
1. to better understand such hierarchical feedback mechanisms,
2. to incorporate them into ecological models, and
3. to use these models to identify management strategies.
This requires a complement to the host's broad experience in theoretical and empirical ecology through transfer of knowledge on evolutionary, food web and systems theory. In particular, to determine the response of ecological systems to environmental change, we need to better understand and model feedbacks between
(1) demographic and evolutionary processes,
(2) communities and individual populations, and
(3) the dynamics of communities, populations and genotypes.
FEMMES will enable the host to develop a new area of competence in formulating ecological forecasts that explicitly account for hierarchical feedback mechanisms. This will help to better forecast and manage the effects of environmental change, and to overcome the lack of suitably trained ecological theoreticians and modellers that prevails throughout Europe. FEMMES will contribute to the priority theme 'Sustainable Development, Global Change and Ecosystems' of FP6 and to the 6th Community Environment Action Programme, particularly the 'protection of natural systems and biodiversity' and the 'sustainable use of natural resources'.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicsmathematical analysisdifferential equations
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesevolutionary biology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyevolutionary ecology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyinvasive species
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Keywords
Call for proposal
FP6-2005-MOBILITY-3
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
TOK - Marie Curie actions-Transfer of KnowledgeCoordinator
POTSDAM
Germany