Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: Scenarios of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service

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Innovative research on the complex interaction of socio-economic and global environmental trends on biodiversity and ecosystem services is needed to help develop more informative scenarios for addressing environmental and human development challenges. To overcome these challenges coupled natural-human systems approaches and analyses are needed. These provide improved scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services that couple the outputs of direct and indirect drivers such as land use, invasive species, overexploitation, biodiversity, environmental change, and pollution. The resulting models provide a methodological state-of-the art that results in more accurate quantitative assessments, better land use, and more effective ecosystem services. Employing this methodology, this research project focuses on addressing land-use changes due to abrupt climate change and their impact on species extinctions, range shifts, and phenological changes. Better knowledge in this area is critical because species loss destabilizes food webs which can negatively impact human well-being and have unexpected consequences for multiple ecosystem functions and associated services. Predicting the response of biodiversity to global change has thus become an important area of research. Present models intended to anticipate future biodiversity and ecosystem services have been criticized for ignoring inputs such as biotic interactions and links between trophic levels (e.g., predator-prey relationships). This research will use a recently created, sophisticated, biodiversity modeling code that integrates predictive biogeography, geography, biostatistics, and trophic web ecology to derive scenarios of the impact of global change on biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and the provision of ecosystem services. As a test case, the program will be combined with information from stakeholders and statistics on vertebrates to generate a suite of likely models of pan-European vertebrate biodiversity as they might be influenced by climate change. Stakeholders information will be used to inform the project so methodological choices, scenarios, and indicators can be made/set in such a way that results are useful for conservation planning and decision-making support. Broader impacts of the work include international collaboration between US investigators and six European (Finnish, United Kingdom, Dutch, German, Swiss, French, and Italian) scientists and the generation of scenarios for improving policy, decision-making, and conservation planning of ecosystem services involving vertebrate species across the European continent. In this coalition of investigators, each country funds it own scientists and their part of the project. Additional broader impacts of the work include workshops and summer schools to inform stakeholder groups and train/education students and postdocs, respectively; the generation of reports for the European Commission; and public outreach through a project website linked to social media and online discussion groups and forums. For the US component of the work, there will be the training of a postdoctoral scholar in transdisciplinary, international science and teamwork.This award supports US researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a coalition of 26 funding agencies from 23 countries through the Belmont Forum call for proposals on "Scenarios of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services". The call was a multilateral initiative designed to support research projects that contribute to the development of scenarios, models, and decision-support tools for understanding and solving critical issues facing our planet. The goal of the competition was to improve and apply participatory scenario methods to enhance research relevance and its acceptance and to address gaps in methods for modelling impact drivers and policy interventions. It was also to develop and communicate levels of uncertainty associated with the models, to improve data accessibility and fill gaps in knowledge. Using this methodology, this research builds on the newly developed Generalized Joint Attribute Model, a generative model that solves two big challenges for predicting community change: (1) the ability to model responses of interdependent species across distantly related taxonomic groups and (2) the ability to link species on scales from plot-based plant abundance to individual- and plot-level herbivore damage. These advances allow modeling of the distribution of individual species and species groups across entire communities, while considering shared responses to the environment and co-variation between species. The modeling code used in the project employs a flexible hierarchical framework to model species communities responding to multiple environmental changes. In addition to the modeling, the project will work to expand the capabilities of the present modeling platform so it can address predator-prey and competition-for-prey interactions. It will also allow incorporation of prior information on expected relationships between species based on relationships within the "who eats whom" network via hierarchical implementation. Species predictions will include an analysis of uncertainties and responses to environmental parameters as well as shared species responses to the environment and interactions with other species. Model results will be used to identify areas of conservation priority by combining principles of systematic conservation planning with ensemble projections of multi-trophic communities and ecosystem services.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.