Collaborative Research EAGER-NEON: Probabilistic Forecasting of Biodiversity Response to Intensifying Drought by Combining NEON, National Climate, Species, and Trait Data Bases

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Drought is a nationwide threat to biodiversity, one of the challenges that motivated development of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Droughts are already affecting organisms from microbes to vertebrates and higher plants. The long-term consequences are unpredictable because each species responds to other species, as they too respond to drought. For example, a species that is insensitive to drought will still respond if the plants on which it feeds or the predators that consume it respond to drought. Ecologists could better anticipate drought effects by developing tools to integrate the information from many species as they respond both to climate and each other. With data from key taxonomic groups monitored by NEON the researchers will use a new approach, joint modeling of species and drought, to develop a predictive framework for biodiversity analysis. Using relevant NEON, predictive models, which combine multiple species, functional types, and functional traits, will be developed to identify commonalities in species responses to changing drought, reducing the dimensionality of thousands of species to groups that can be predicted. Indirect effects of species interactions will be emphasized in planned modeling activities. For example, a tree species may increase in crowded stands only when others decrease. The effects of temperature usually depend on precipitation. The results of this collaboration involving ecology and statistics will be of interest not only ecologists, but for all global change scientists and policy makers.