Project description
Studying plant traits to protect forests from climate change
Forests play a key role in Earth’s ecosystems by absorbing carbon dioxide and preserving biodiversity. However, forests are threatened by droughts and wildfires – phenomena expected to increase in the future. Making forests resistant to droughts is now a crucial necessity. Plant traits are characteristics determining the way plants react to environmental changes. The EU-funded Plant-FATE project intends to determine the plant traits that confer drought-resistance. Researchers will study plant evolution in two different drought situations using data on plant traits from a wet and dry environment. The aim is to accurately predict and identify species and geographical areas vulnerable to climate change.
Objective
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.
Fields of science
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesevolutionary biology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinephysiology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
2361 Laxenburg
Austria