Description du projet
Prévoir les effets du changement climatique sur l’avenir des forêts tropicales
Les forêts tropicales rendent d’importants services écosystémiques aux populations humaines, comme le stockage du carbone, la régulation du climat et le fait de constituer un réservoir de biodiversité. L’avenir de ces services écosystémiques reste toutefois incertain car le changement climatique affecte rapidement les forêts tropicales en termes de composition, de dynamique et de fonctions. Pour améliorer les prévisions concernant l’avenir des forêts tropicales dans des conditions abiotiques et biotiques changeantes, nous devons faire la lumière sur les mécanismes par le biais desquels le phénotype des arbres tropicaux parvient à saisir les différences de performances individuelles le long des gradients environnementaux. En utilisant des approches de modélisation de pointe avec des enquêtes démographiques à long terme et des données exhaustives sur les caractéristiques de plus de 700 espèces d’arbres tropicaux réparties sur quatre continents, le projet TropDemTrait, financé par l’UE, entend fournir une meilleure compréhension des mécanismes intervenant dans la dynamique des forêts tropicales en réponse aux facteurs abiotiques et biotiques à une échelle pantropicale.
Objectif
Tropical forests represent key terrestrial ecosystems for carbon stocks and biodiversity. The dynamics of carbon storage in forests are primarily driven by tree performance in terms of mortality and growth. But climate change is rapidly altering tree performance, with important consequences for carbon cycle, climate regulation and biodiversity. Yet, we are still lacking accurate predictions of the response of tropical forest in terms of their composition, dynamics and functions to altered climate. While demographic approaches have traditionally focused on how individual performance vary with ontogeny or size, trait-based approaches have often focused on how morphological or physiological properties of individuals (traits) change with abiotic and biotic factors and links to performance. Though the link between traits and performance influences population dynamics and subsequent community structure and ecosystem functions, we still understand very little about the drivers shaping the trait-performance relationship. With tropical forests facing rapidly changing abiotic and biotic conditions with global changes, we need a better mechanistic understanding of tropical tree growth and mortality response to the interplay of traits with abiotic and biotic factors. The proposed project will yield a major contribution to this goal by using state-of-the-art, powerful modelling approaches with unprecedented demographic data spanning over 40 years and leaf and wood economics and hydraulics traits of over 700 tropical tree species distributed in 74 forest plots along broad soil and climatic gradients on four continents. Our results will bring a mechanistic understanding of how the interplay of species traits, tree size, climate, soil, and biotic interactions impact tree growth and mortality rates in tropical forests, while disentangling region-specific from pantropical effects.
Champ scientifique
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculturehorticulturearboriculture
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesatmospheric sciencesclimatologyclimatic changes
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesforestry
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
13572 Marseille
France