SCALE · Projecting global biodiversity responses from first biological principles
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-12-01 → 2022-11-30
- EU contribution
- €232,498
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Projecting global biodiversity responses from first biological principles
Forecasting the responses of organisms to global climate and habitat change remains a chef priority for ecological research. Reliable projections of these responses require integrating information on the physiological and behavioural traits that determine the capacity of organisms to either buffer or adapt to environmental change. However, most of our current predictive tools rely on phenomenological models built on observed organismal-environment correlations, with a limited capacity to predict organismal performance under unprecedented environmental conditions. In macroecology – the study of relationships between organisms and their environment at large spatial scales – mechanistic approaches are emerging strongly. Unlike phenomenological models, these mechanistic models build upon physical principles of energy and mass transfer and physiological information to predict how key state variables such as body temperature, metabolic rate, or water balance respond to climate across space and time. Despite their potential, mechanistic models face important challenges in macroecology such as the problem of how to scale up individual metrics into higher levels of ecological organization such as populations and species assemblages. SCALE adopts a mechanistic perspective to investigate how heat and mass balances scale up into macroecological and macroevolutionary patterns across different animal taxa including terrestrial and aquatic ectotherms and endotherms. To achieve this, we developed biophysical models of heat and mass transfer and used cutting-edge computational techniques to simulate the response of multiple species to climate and habitat change. The overall objectives of SCALE include: (1) To develop and disseminate mechanistic models providing access to newly developed software and organizing workshops to facilitate their implementation; (2) To validate the models comparing predicted vs observed patterns of species’ functional traits across broad-scale climatic gradients; (3) To project the models’ predictions into future climate change scenarios.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Realistic projections of the biological impacts of climate change require a unified framework capable of integrating advances from distinct research areas such as ecophysiology, behavioural ecology, and biogeography. Mechanistic modelling in macroecology arises as a promising framework to address this challenge, because it aims at describing biodiversity patterns from biophysical, physiological, and behavioural processes determining the way organisms interact with their environment. In this project, I will investigate how heat- and water-transfer mechanisms determine global patterns of species richness and thermal adaptations of terrestrial ectotherms, a group that is especially vulnerable to global change. The specific objectives of this proposal are (1) to investigate how temperature regulation and water availability constraint global patterns of species richness of reptiles and amphibians; (2) investigate how temperature regulation influences patterns of variation of thermal tolerance across macroclimatic gradients; and finally, (3) forecast the response of these patterns to future climatic conditions. To achieve these objectives, I will combine cutting-edge biophysical models of heat- and water-transfer pathways between ectotherms and their environment, with empirical data on species’ geographical ranges and thermal tolerance traits obtained from the literature. Ultimately, this proposal will contribute to the emerging field of mechanistic modelling in macroecology, providing methods to integrate multiple sources of biological information, and techniques to forecast the organismal responses to climate change. The training in geographical analysis of mechanistic models will boost my development as an independent and innovative frontline researcher in macroecology in the EU.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
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Data: CORDIS, © European Union