Collaborative Research: BoCP-Implementation: Biodiversity and stability on a changing planet: plant traits and interactions that stabilize or destabilize ecosystems and populations

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Extreme climate events and biodiversity loss are destabilizing ecosystems. Increases in the variability of plant productivity from one year to the next could threaten the reliable supply of ecosystem services that depend on plant productivity, which include food production and climate regulation. Furthermore, extreme climate events and some other global environmental changes (e.g., nitrogen deposition and rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations) could destabilize populations of individual species, potentially threatening their persistence. Species traits can determine responses to global change and influence stability. It remains unclear, however, how global changes are shifting plant species’ traits and interactions, through ecological and evolutionary responses, in ways that could stabilize or destabilize ecosystems and populations. Furthermore, it is not yet possible to predict long-term invariability from short-term estimates of resistance and resilience or to forecast the resistance of ecosystems and populations to perturbations, such as droughts, prior to their occurrence. Through theoretical modeling and ecological and evolutionary experiments this work will evaluate the effects of species traits on community resistance and resilience the face of environmental change. In addition, the project will (1) engage K-12 students and teachers from urban and rural communities on field trips to the field research site; (2) develop science kits and lessons for use in K-12 classrooms; and (3) provide research training and mentoring for undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars. This project is developing and testing an integrated and predictive framework for considering how global changes are driving ecological and evolutionary shifts in plant traits in ways that can stabilize or destabilize populations or ecosystems. The proposed projects will: (1) test new theoretical predictions regarding how invariability depends on its resistance and resilience components; (2) determine how invariability, resistance, and resilience depend on plant species traits and species interactions; (3) conduct new greenhouse and field experiments, using seeds collected from ongoing long-term experiments, to determine how evolution has altered species’ traits, resistance, resilience, and invariability; and (4) scale out to other grasslands and forests and up to larger spatial scales to test theoretical predictions regarding dependence of invariability on its resistance and resilience components, and how invariability, resistance, and resilience depend on plant species traits through a synthesis working group. Much of this work uses data and seeds from BioDIV and BioCON, the world’s longest-running biodiversity experiments. These experiments fully cross biodiversity treatments with several global change treatments (warming, drought, elevated CO2, and/or enriched N), allowing tests of eco-evolutionary responses to global changes in the presence or absence of plant species interactions.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.