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HEIndividual fellowship2023–2025

ClimRes · Quantifying the resilience of vertebrates to changing climates worldwide

Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Duration
2023-09-01 → 2025-08-31
EU contribution
€165,313
Participants
3
Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.

Results in brief

Quantifying the resilience of vertebrates to changing climates worldwide

Climate change is reshaping ecosystems across Europe and worldwide, yet species differ greatly in their ability to cope with these changes. Some populations rebound quickly after environmental shocks, while others decline. Understanding why such differences exist is central to biodiversity conservation and to predicting the long-term consequences of climate change. This fellowship set out to link the small-scale processes of life history and demography with the large-scale challenge of species survival under global change. By studying both vertebrate and invertebrate systems, the project aimed to: - Clarify how resilience can be defined and measured in ecological populations; - Develop new analytical frameworks for assessing the impact of climate extremes on animal/plant survival and reproduction; - Provide experimental evidence for how temperature affects development and morphology in vulnerable species. The overall objective was to provide new concepts, tools, and evidence that help researchers, conservationists and policy makers anticipate how species and ecosystems will respond to rapid environmental change. In doing so, the project contributes to the EU’s biodiversity and climate priorities by improving the scientific basis for resilience-based management strategies.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union

Project objective

Climate change remains one of the most critical issues facing global biodiversity and has already had a widespread negative impact on substantial numbers of terrestrial species. Despite these negative impacts, not all species are expected to respond equally to a changing climate. Identifying species that are vulnerable to climate-induced population declines is therefore vital for conservation efforts. Life history and demographic differences between taxa are a key candidate for explaining differences in these responses, but we currently lack a clear empirical link between demography and climate vulnerability across species. The novel framework of demographic resilience provides a promising tool to predict how a species will respond to environmental change. However, there is a desperate need to apply the population-resilience framework to recently developed datasets gathering demographic data and population changes for thousands of species. In the current fellowship, using demographic and abundance data from vertebrates across the world’s ecosystems, I will develop quantitative tools to quantify which species are currently the most resilient to a changing climate. To achieve this, I will address the following three broad research topics: 1) Quantify species-specific population responses to the climate anomalies and species-specific demographic resilience across the terrestrial vertebrates, 2) Assess whether demographic resilience predicts population-level responses to climate change, and 3) Infer taxonomic groups that are most vulnerable to a changing climate and use this information to improve conservation assessments. This fellowship will bridge the gap between population demography and environmental change, improving our understanding of how human-induced climate change is reshaping the natural world.

Original text from CORDIS.

Participants

  • AGENCIA ESTATAL CONSEJO SUPERIOR DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS · MadridCoordinatorSpain
  • THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD · OxfordUnited Kingdom
  • THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD · SHEFFIELDUnited Kingdom

Links

Data: CORDIS, © European Union