Plant-FATE · Predicting global vulnerability of forests to drought using plant functional trait evolution
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-08-01 → 2021-07-31
- EU contribution
- €186,167
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
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Results in brief
Predicting global vulnerability of forests to drought using plant functional trait evolution
Forests across the globe are increasingly being threatened by various anthropogenic drivers, especially changes in climate. Climate variability is expected to increase in the future, leading to more frequent and more intense droughts. Yet, despite decades of research, understanding the drought vulnerability of forests has remained limited, primarily because of a lack of realism in vegetation models and, in particular, their lack of capacity to predict plant responses to unprecedented environmental conditions. Thus, the Plant-FATE (Plant FunctionAl Trait Evolution) project has aimed to incorporate new and emerging paradigms in vegetation modelling centred on the principles of adaptation and evolution, to develop a new trait-based eco-evolutionary vegetation model and use it to predict global plant responses to drought and assess the vulnerability of forests to future changes in climate. The two most important physiological processes determining the responses of individual plants to droughts are carbon uptake (photosynthesis) and water transport (hydraulics): accordingly, plants have evolved diverse photosynthetic and hydraulic strategies to respond to drought, addressing the fundamental tradeoff between their acquisition of CO2 and water and their survival from carbon starvation and hydraulic failure. With individual plant responses scaling up to the level of plant communities, these strategies influence emergent ecosystem properties in terms of community structure, ecosystem productivity, and biodiversity. Through Plant-FATE Objectives 1 and 2, I have developed new optimality-based theory for the aforementioned fundamental physiological processes and embedded this theory into a trait-based eco-evolutionary vegetation model (Plant-FATE-EGVM) capable of representing competition for light, individual-level and community-level responses to drought, successional dynamics, and trait evolution. Through Plant-FATE Objective 3, I have calibrated the Plant-FATE-EGVM at both local and global scales, enabling predictions of the responses of current plant communities to future climate change.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project 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.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- INTERNATIONALES INSTITUT FUER ANGEWANDTE SYSTEMANALYSE · LaxenburgCoordinatorAustria
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union