Descripción del proyecto
El estudio de las plantas como herramienta para proteger a los bosques del cambio climático
Los bosques desempeñan una función crucial en los ecosistemas de la Tierra al absorber dióxido de carbono y preservar la biodiversidad. Sin embargo, los bosques están amenazados por las sequías y los incendios forestales, fenómenos que se espera que aumenten en el futuro. Hacer que los bosques sean resistentes a las sequías es ahora una necesidad fundamental. Las características de las plantas son rasgos que determinan la forma en que las plantas reaccionan a los cambios ambientales. El objetivo del proyecto Plant-FATE, financiado con fondos europeos, es determinar las características de las plantas que les confieren resistencia a la sequía. Los investigadores estudiarán la evolución de las plantas en dos situaciones de sequía diferentes utilizando datos sobre las características de las plantas de un ambiente húmedo y seco. El propósito es predecir e identificar con precisión las especies y áreas geográficas vulnerables al cambio climático.
Objetivo
The earth is projected to experience higher climate variability in future, with increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events such as droughts and wildfires. Drought is a severe threat to world’s forests, and incidents of drought-induced forest die-back are already being reported. The resistance of the world’s forests to drought will be key to maintaining crucial ecosystem services, such as sequestering carbon and maintaining biodiversity.
To understand what plant traits are responsible for drought-resistance, we aim to push the envelope of contemporary eco-evolutionary dynamic vegetation modelling. Accounting for trade-offs in growth via acquisition of resources and resistance to drought-induced mortality, we will allow plant traits to evolve under realistic drought regimes. We will calibrate and test our model using data on plant traits and long-term demography available from two tropical forest sites – a wet site from Costa Rica, and a seasonally dry site from southern India. We will then parametrize our model at a wider scale, using available data on traits and environmental fluxes from sites across the globe in different biomes.
Bringing together expertise from plant physiology, evolutionary dynamics, and high-performance computing, our approach will advance our abilities to predict evolutionarily emergent plant strategies, plant productivity, and ecosystem services under current climatic conditions, and identify species and regions that are likely to be vulnerable to future changes in climate. Our models and methods could potentially be adopted for similar analyses in the agriculture sector. We will communicate our results to policymakers and the public via an interactive web-based dashboard. IIASA will provide the researcher with the perfect platform for research training, and for a dialogue with policymakers and other stakeholders to prepare for mitigating and adapting to climate change.
Ámbito científico
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesevolutionary biology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinephysiology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinador
2361 Laxenburg
Austria