RELOAD · Realised ecological niche and species distributions under global environmental change
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-09-01 → 2025-08-31
- EU contribution
- €181,153
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Realised ecological niche and species distributions under global environmental change
Global environmental change, including land use change, climate change, pollution, and biological invasions, is causing accelerated rates of biodiversity change. Species are going extinct at rates of at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the average in the past 10 million years, while the geographical ranges of many others are contracting, shifting, and in fewer cases, expanding. Hence, we need to understand and predict how species are readjusting their geographical distributions in response to environmental change. Predictions are typically based on the modelled ecological niche, defined by the set of environmental conditions under which the targeted species has been recorded. However, these niche models are limited by the constrained spatio-temporal context of the data records, and thus their predictions do not account for the fact that the realised response of a species to the environment (i.e., their realised ecological niche) may vary in space and time. In this project, we studied how and why the ecological niche of species changes in space and time, how the magnitude of niche change varies among species, and how we can account for context dependence in niche responses to improve predictions about species distributions under global environmental change.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Species are readjusting their geographical distributions as a response to ongoing environmental change. Thus, predicting species distributions is an urgent conservation endeavour. However, the responses of a species to the environment may vary in space and time (i.e. niche change) as the result of the spatiotemporal context of where and when its different populations occur. Niche changes are expected to have important consequences: (i) they can invalidate niche-based species distribution models, as a widely used predictive conservation tool, due to the limited spatiotemporal context of the underlying species distribution data, and (ii) they can impact the performance of species (e.g. their conservation status and extinction risk) that become decoupled from their optimal environmental conditions. However, we still poorly understand how the magnitude of niche change varies among species, especially within their native distributions and over relatively short time spans under ongoing global change. I will study how and why the magnitude of niche change varies among bird species. More specifically, I will examine how species functional traits and rates of global change within the species' geographical ranges affect the magnitude of niche change, and how niche change may impact the conservation status of species. The ultimate goal is to produce a global synthesis of spatial and temporal niche change to understand the general propensity of bird species to change their realised ecological niches. The project will contribute to estimate species-wise uncertainty of species distribution models and refine their predictions based on species' ecological traits.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS · MadridCoordinatorSpain
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101059418
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e508b17b4a&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e51ffc2e6e&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union