Periodic Reporting for period 4 - NICH (Novel interactions and species’ responses to climate change)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2020-08-01 al 2021-12-31
We established a separate field experiment (WP2) at three elevations to investigate whether species’ traits predict the population-level outcome of pairwise competitive interactions measured on 14 lowland and alpine species. We found that competition shapes upper as well as lower elevation range limits in this system (Lyu & Alexander 2022), and that this is mainly due to impacts of competitors on plant growth. Nonetheless, functional traits were in general not strong predictors of interactions between either current or novel competitors. We therefore developed alternative modeling approaches to study species’ ranges and their dynamics (WP3), including occupancy models, evolutionary functional-structural plant models, Bayesian non-linear distribution models (Bramon Mora et al., in revision), metacommunity models (Alexander et al. 2018) and evolutionary trade-off models (Alexander et al. 2022). We also reviewed how positive biotic interactions shape range limits (Stephan et al. 2021) and outlined challenges and opportunities to link community ecology and marcoecology (Alexander et al. 2016; Wüest et al. 2019, Guisan et al. 2019).
So far, the project has led to 15 publications, with several others currently in prep. or review, involved 13 student projects from bachelor to PhD levels, and been represented in over 30 seminars or presentations and numerous public events.