OPUS: The Role of the Environment in Shaping Plant Diversity from Global to Local Scales

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Climate is the strongest influence on biological diversity in space and time. However, there are multiple aspect to climate (e.g., rainfall, temperature, seasonality) and how they interact to determine the number of different species living in a region is not well understood. The main objective of this research project is to achieve a better understanding of how and why climate interacts with other influences to shape the species diversity of natural plant communities. This information is important to improving our capacity to forecast how plant diversity is likely to change in the future. The researcher will review and synthesize 20 years of experimental and observational work on plant diversity in the California Floristic Province, to provide an overarching understanding of the mechanisms that shape biodiversity, from local to global scales. The project will also make useful data sets publicly available and will support efforts to educate land managers and the public about plant diversity. The focus of this synthesis will be to better understand how climate shapes patterns of plant diversity at multiple levels (species, functional, phylogenetic) and spatial scales (local to biome), alone or in interaction with other factors (soils, fire, herbivores, invasions). Topics to be explored include why Mediterranean climates host high plant diversity, how plant diversity will change under future climate, and whether plant functional traits can be used to test the tolerance hypothesis for climate-diversity relationships. Products of this synthesis will include several review papers on underexplored aspects of the climate-diversity relationships, data publications presenting three multisite and multiyear plant community and environmental data sets, and a monograph on plant diversity for the Princeton series.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.