CAWEB · Testing macroecological theory using simplified systems
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-09-01 → 2022-08-31
- EU contribution
- €190,681
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Testing macroecological theory using simplified systems
Understanding how biological communities assemble, persist, and evolve is a central topic of debate in ecology. This information is key amidst escalating global anthropogenic threats, insofar as realistic predictions of biodiversity change require explicitly accounting for community assembly processes. In spite of the efforts made to unravel the general drivers of community assembly and change, the overwhelming complexity of most ecological systems makes it virtually impossible to realistically understand them across space and time and predict the behaviour of biological communities in a climate change perspective. Caves are ideal natural laboratories to understand how biological communities assemble and evolve owing to their isolated nature, constant climate, and low species diversity. Within the project CAWEB, we used caves, and specific spider communities within them, as a scalable model system to minimize confounding effects and to reduce the number of parameters needed to develop mechanistic representations of key ecological processes underlying assembly rules in caves. We defined three objectives at the beginning of the action: 1) To quantify the importance of functional traits in the persistence of species in changing environments. 2) To quantify deviations from expected trait dispersion in the cave environment and to understand how these change with spatial scale. 3) To evaluate the sensitivity of species to anthropogenic change and quantify which traits are connected to a higher sensitivity to environmental alterations.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Community assembly, how they change in space and time, and how they will be affected by global threats, is one of the most pressing issues in ecology and conservation biology. To fully understand assembly rules and community change, one has to delve into multiple interrelated factors, such as the history of environmental and habitat changes in the past, current biotic and abiotic factors, spatial constraints and future scenarios for all these. Yet, two factors have prevented us from obtaining a complete picture for any organism. First, communities are extremely complex, typically encompassing thousands of species and millions of interspecific interactions. Second, future scenarios are overwhelming to model without the challenge of dealing with chaotic systems, where even small changes can lead to large, unpredictable, consequences. Here, I propose to use cave communities as the simplest and easiest setting to model assembly rules and future change across space and time. Caves offer unique opportunities for eco-evolutionary studies because they are characterized by a low abundance and diversity of organisms and interactions, they receive limited external inputs and are easily modelled. By combining a range of state-of-art algorithms and computer simulations, I will investigate the eco-evolutionary processes that shape functional and taxonomic diversity in subterranean spider communities at a continental scale, as well as the sensitivity of specialised species to climate alterations. I will rely on extensive datasets already collected and try to answer the question: what drives community assembly across space and time, and how can we predict the consequences of climate change on current biomes?. The project will be implemented at the Finnish Natural History Museum, and will be supervised by Dr Pedro Cardoso. An intersectoral secondment in mechanistic modelling at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, supervised by Prof Volker Grimm, is also anticipated.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO · HelsinkiCoordinatorFinland
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/882221
- https://www.researchgate.net/project/CAWEB-Testing-macroecological-theory-using-simplified-systems
Data: CORDIS, © European Union