GEODEM · Geography of Demography: modelling plant population responses to global habitat patterns
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2015-06-01 → 2017-05-31
- EU contribution
- €187,866
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-RI
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Geography of Demography: modelling plant population responses to global habitat patterns
Predicting the locations where plant species occur, or could occur, is a critical challenge for ecologists in the coming decades. As the global climate alters, it changes where different plants can persist. As a result, it is imperative that we understand how plant populations respond to climatic constraints and use that information to predict how they are likely to respond to climatic changes in the future. Forecasts of plant redistributions on Earth due to climate change have been focused on estimating losses in the amount and quality of habitat conditions. However, an important consequence of environmental changes on living organisms has remained largely unexplored: the spatial reconfiguration of suitable habitats, such as the increasing loss of connection between habitat patches throughout species’ area of distribution. Plants support the very survival of the human race. They provide us food, pastures for livestock, and places for recreation and wellbeing. They also directly and indirectly provide numerous invaluable ecosystem services such as water regulation, carbon sequestration and flood prevention. To safeguard these ecosystem services, we need to provide conservation managers robust ecological models able to identify species vulnerable or resistant to deteriorating habitat conditions or to major habitat reconfigurations. During GEODEM I examined the geographic configuration of habitat patches suitable for hundreds of plant species. My aim was to develop predictive models of how these biogeographic patterns vary with species’ biological properties and geophysical constraints on the persistence and expansion of plant populations.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Mankind is profoundly altering the environments in which plant and animal populations live. An era of such massive habitat rearrangements requires ecologists to take new approaches to increase our understanding of species distribution and likelihood of persistence worldwide. Improved ecological models of range-wide persistence and response to the simultaneous threats of climate change, habitat destruction and landscape reconfiguration are required to inform management of biodiversity at large scales. GEODEM brings together global datasets of plant distribution and demography to gain insight into how the geographic configuration of habitats affects growth, survival and reproduction of more than 500 plant species worldwide. The project has two main objectives: 1. Geographic Range Pattern Analysis: Using species distribution models and global spatial statistics tools to quantify and compare spatial patterns of suitable environmental conditions across species’ biogeographic ranges. 2. Landscape Demography: Testing how the spatial arrangement of suitable habitat within the geographic space can inform population responses to environmental gradients. The fellow will be supervised by and collaborate with world leaders in spatial ecology in Ireland and other European countries to accomplish her goals. The prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship will enable her to develop expertise in currently disparate areas of species distribution modelling and demography and place her in a unique position to make significant contributions to the urgent problem of population persistence at large scales during this era of global change. It will enable the fellow to build an independent research program in Europe after gaining research experience in top universities in Canada and Australia.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE PROVOST, FELLOWS, FOUNDATION SCHOLARS & THE OTHER MEMBERS OF BOARD, OF THE COLLEGE OF THE HOLY & UNDIVIDED TRINITY OF QUEEN ELIZABETH NEAR DUBLIN · DublinCoordinatorIreland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union