FOREPAST · Past, present and future environmental, biological and social transitions in coastal ecosystems
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-03-01 → 2021-12-25
- EU contribution
- €170,122
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Past, present and future environmental, biological and social transitions in coastal ecosystems
Coastal saltmarshes are valuable ecosystems for human societies, since they provide a range of ecosystem services, including carbon sequestration and storage, delivering natural coastal protection, and providing habitat for a range of wildlife species. However, saltmarshes are prone to abrupt changes, sometimes due to only small perturbations, which can precipitate the system into an unvegetated state. Despite transitions usually have an anthropogenic origin, the occurrence of such changes can have negative societal implications, through a decrease in ecosystem services delivery. Thus, we need to understand the nature and occurrence of abrupt changes, as not doing so, can severely impact our capacity to adopt management actions in a timely manner. The short-term duration of most ecological studies undermines our capacity to examine ecosystem transitions. FOREPAST has taken an interdisciplinary approach to address this issue by using a combination of (1) palaeoecological research, to look for past ecosystem transitions; (2) contemporary manipulative experiments, to evaluate the drivers of saltmarsh resilience; and (3) an assessment of public’s perceptions towards coastal vegetated ecosystems, their threats, and the perceived benefits they deliver. We found evidence for some saltmarshes being more prone to transitioning between vegetated and unvegetated states (more dynamic) than others, with obvious implications for the delivery of ecosystem services. In terms of carbon storage, the carbon stored in dynamic marshes was three times lower than that from more stable marshes (those consistently vegetated, with less abrupt changes in their paleo-record). Saltmarsh recovery from disturbances was linked to climatic conditions (i.e. temperature) and sediment supply. Importantly, current levels of people awareness of these environments were found to be low, despite their important role for coastal protection, habitat provision and carbon sequestration.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Regime shifts are common phenomena in ecological systems. These abrupt changes can be induced by sometimes only slight fluctuations or small perturbations. Current understanding of the mechanisms that produce critical transitions in real-world systems is insufficient. Despite transitions have an anthropogenic origin in most cases, the occurrence of such shifts can have pervasive societal implications, typically due to the impairment of a functionally complex ecosystem state, which delivered a number of ecosystem services, into another degraded state, which tends to provide much less services. Thus, our lack of understanding of so-called early warning signals (EWS) of impending change, can severely impact our capacity to adopt management actions in a timely manner. The main limitation when searching for EWS in ecological data is the short-term duration of most studies. FOREPAST takes an interdisciplinary approach to address this issue, and aims at 1) using the paleoecological record to find EWS, which, 2) then will be validated in contemporary ecosystems by means of a manipulative experiment along a gradient of stress. Given that human development is behind most ecosystem transitions, FOREPAST aims at 3) conveying the results of the natural sciences’ WPs with stakeholders in the area of study, to understand their perceived loss/gain when ecological transitions occur, and the trade-offs the society is willing to make to prevent (or not) these scenarios. The focal ecosystems of this action are the Mediterranean wetlands of the Ebre Delta, which are included in the Natura 2000 Network, for being Habitats of community interest and sites of international importance for Birds. Thus, the results arising from this project will provide relevant information for the application of EU directives, specially related to climate change adaptation and coastal resilience, as well as a great leap for the applicant’s career, with valuable training and high-level publications expected.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAT DE BARCELONA · BarcelonaCoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union