Project description
Human and climate impacts on the carbon sink ecosystems
Carbon sinks are instrumental in preventing atmospheric carbon levels from rising as they absorb more carbon than they release. Peatlands and seagrass meadows are a valuable agent in resisting climate change and their conservation is vitally important. Due to the scarcity of long-term monitoring, knowledge on factors that threaten natural carbon sinks is limited. The EU-funded PALAEOCON project proposes a palaeoecological approach to study terrestrial and marine carbon sinks for informed conservation processes. The researcher will investigate the peatlands and seagrass meadows in the Iberian Peninsula to estimate human and climate impacts on carbon sink ecosystems.
Objective
Carbon sink conservation is a priority under the current Global Change scenario. However, our understanding of the factors that threaten natural carbon-storage systems is limited by the paucity of long-term records capturing their responses to anthropogenic- and climate-driven perturbations. Much of this limitation arises from the short time span covered by ecological monitoring, usually going back just a few decades at best. To capture decadal-to-millennial scale dynamics, an alternative approach is to use the palaeoecological record. Here, I propose a multiproxy palaeoecological approach to study the long-term resilience of two paradigmatic terrestrial and marine carbon sinks: peatlands and seagrass meadows. I will monitor changes in biodiversity and carbon storage ability using a state-of-the-art, multidisciplinary combination of palynology and charcoal analysis, dating by lead and carbon isotopes, sedimentology, geochemistry and numerical methods. Integrating these complementary proxies, I will reconstruct millennial-long ecological dynamics (e.g. long-term trends and regime shifts) to evaluate the effect of human and climate impacts on carbon sinks’ ecosystem services. This knowledge will inform conservation priorities by identifying the most influential drivers of ecological change. Moreover, it will propose conservation targets by reconstructing pre-anthropogenic ecosystem states. To increase its translatable impact, PALAEOCON will focus on Iberian habitats that are protected under the Habitats Directive of the European Commission. Indeed, I am committed to engaging with environmental authorities to complement current conservation strategies. On a broader scale, PALAEOCON will produce high-resolution, multiproxy records on the Holocene palaeoenvironmental history of southwestern Europe. By offering valuable insight to both applied and basic science, PALAEOCON will help advance my career aspiration of establishing as a world-class leader in palaeoecology.
Fields of science
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeologysedimentology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencespalaeontologypalynology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencespalaeontologypaleoecology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsnumerical analysis
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
15782 Santiago De Compostela
Spain