Descrizione del progetto
Studiare i tratti delle piante per proteggere le foreste dai cambiamenti climatici
Le foreste svolgono un ruolo fondamentale negli ecosistemi della Terra, poiché assorbono l’anidride carbonica e preservano la biodiversità. Ciononostante, sono minacciate da siccità e incendi, fenomeni che si prevede saranno sempre più frequenti in futuro, perciò rendere le foreste resistenti alla siccità è ora una necessità di importanza cruciale. I tratti delle piante sono caratteristiche determinate dal modo in cui esse reagiscono ai cambiamenti ambientali. Il progetto Plant-FATE, finanziato dall’UE, si propone di rivelare i tratti delle piante che conferiscono resistenza alla siccità. I ricercatori studieranno l’evoluzione delle piante in due diverse situazioni di siccità, impiegando i dati sui tratti delle piante provenienti da un ambiente asciutto e da uno umido. L’obiettivo è prevedere in modo accurato e individuare le specie e le zone geografiche vulnerabili ai cambiamenti climatici.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesevolutionary biology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinephysiology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinatore
2361 Laxenburg
Austria