ADAPT · Ancient Drivers of Adaptations in Plant Traits
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-09-01 → 2025-09-03
- EU contribution
- €224,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Ancient Drivers of Adaptations in Plant Traits
The ADAPT Project addresses a pressing global issue: the increasing severity and frequency of wildfires under climate change. Recent events such as the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires and recurrent fires in California demonstrate how rising global temperatures are intensifying fire activity, threatening biodiversity, human livelihoods, and ecosystem stability. Understanding how plants have evolved to persist in fire-prone environments is essential for assessing ecosystem resilience in the face of ongoing environmental change. ADAPT investigates the deep evolutionary origins of fire-related traits in plants, focusing on one of the earliest proposed fire-adaptive traits, branch shedding in conifers, which first appeared over 280 million years ago. The project explores whether this and other fire-related traits evolved as direct responses to wildfire or as part of broader climatic and ecological shifts. To address this question, ADAPT integrated three key research components: 1. Palaeoecological reconstruction of late Palaeozoic landscapes revealed that ancient ecosystems were more complex and variable than previously understood, transitioning from wetland forests to drier, mosaic environments that shaped early fire regimes. 2. Flammability experimentation on living conifers established a novel protocol for shoot-level testing and demonstrated that plant functional traits contribute to ignition and combustion behaviour, providing critical data for linking modern and ancient fire dynamics. 3. Palaeofire modelling combined fossil and experimental data to estimate fire behaviour under past atmospheric conditions, showing that both fire and climate acted as long-term selective pressures influencing the evolution of fire-related plant traits. Together, these results represent the first integrated analysis of how shifting climate, vegetation, and fire regimes interacted to shape plant evolution through deep time. The project provides a framework for interpreting the persistence and function of fire-related traits in today’s ecosystems and for anticipating their responses to future climate-driven changes in wildfire activity. By bridging fossil evidence, modern experimentation, and modelling, ADAPT enhances our understanding of the feedbacks between vegetation, climate, and fire, knowledge that is vital for informing global biodiversity and resilience strategies in a warming world.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The world has recently seen the worst wildfires in human living memory, including the ongoing siege of California wildfires and 2019-2020 Australian bushfires, which burnt 72,000 square miles. Predictions that global warming will enhance the number of high fire risk days in fire-prone regions highlights the importance of understanding the relationship between plants, climate and fire. Plants that live in fire-prone regions often possess distinctive traits that allow them to thrive following wildfires. However, it remains a major ecological debate if such trait acquisition has actually been driven by fire itself. To understand the drivers of trait acquisition and their continued function in modern ecosystems, we have to look to the past. ADAPT will examine the evolution of the earliest proposed fire-adapted trait, branch shedding in conifers, which emerged in the Permian (280 Mya). To date no research has established the conditions surrounding the origin of this important trait. Therefore, whether this trait emerged as a response to fire or the otherwise changing climate is unknown. ADAPT will test the hypothesis that fire-proneness is a prerequisite for the evolution of fire-adaptive traits, where it will uniquely examine whether a shift in fire-regime post-dates the appearance of branch shedding, suggesting that the trait was the result of multi-agent selection co-opted to improve fitness of some conifers; or prior to the evolution of branch shedding, suggesting that the trait evolved in response to selection by fire and that fire has been a selective force over 100s of millions of years of Earth history. Fire-adapted traits are what continue to ensure survival of plants in Earth’s fire-prone ecosystems. As such, the results of ADAPT are critical if we are to understand the continued functioning of fire-adaptive traits in the changing environmental conditions of the modern world and assess the resilience of Earth’s ecosystems to climate-driven changes in wildfires.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER · ExeterCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union