Project description
Annual rings to understand shrubs growth drivers and dynamics
Arctic and Alpine ecosystems are profoundly affected by climate change. Arctic and Alpine shrubs responses to climate change are variable and influenced by different factors. However, we lack knowledge particularly as regards their variations in growth and wood anatomical traits. The EU-funded BoRiS project will uncover the information stored in annual rings, to understand the sequence of responses from individuals to communities and get insight into future range dynamics of Arctic and Alpine shrubs. The project will provide a retrospective quantification of growth and wood anatomical traits, estimate their reaction to environmental changes, examine their potential as climatological proxies, unravel influencing abiotic and biotic factors and trace the patterns of future local and regional shrubs dynamics.
Objective
Climate change is observed and predicted to profoundly affect Arctic and Alpine ecosystems. These ecosystems, at the
border of woody plant growth, change at a faster rate than the global average. Growth responses of Arctic-Alpine shrubs to
climate change are variable and influenced by different factors. A key to understand the plasticity of responses to climate
change is a detailed analysis of growth at the intra-individual to the community level. Currently, we lack knowledge on the
intra-individual, intraspecific, and interspecific variation in growth and wood anatomical traits across environmental gradients.
BoRiS aims at uncovering the information archived in annual rings to gain fundamental new insight on how the responses
scale from individuals to communities. Insight into past dynamics opens a valuable window to the future and provides the
basis for predicting future range dynamics of Arctic-Alpine shrubs. BoRiS provides a retrospective quantification of growth
and wood anatomical traits from Arctic-Alpine shrub species, assesses their variation across environmental conditions, tests
their significance as climatological proxies, disentangles the abiotic and biotic factors influencing growth, and models future
shrub dynamics at the landscape to regional scale. BoRiS is possible due to a unique data set of > 1000 individual shrubs
sampled in Arctic and Alpine areas and an innovative integration of state-of-the art quantitative wood anatomical analyses,
classical dendrochronology, a newly proposed community-based dendroecology framework, range dynamic modelling and
remote sensing observations. It is the first project to combine growth and wood anatomical responses of a large number of
Arctic-Alpine shrubs and to upscale the results from individuals to communities. BoRiS is envisioned to be the first step in the
development of an independent research field linking plant growth dynamics in a community perspective with earth
observations across space.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
8000 Aarhus C
Denmark