Change in arctic and alpine plant communities: the roles of climate and geodiversity

北极和高山植物群落的变化：气候和地理多样性的作用

• 批准号: 2109883
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Nottingham
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2018 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2109883
• 关键词: Change; arctic; alpine; plant; communities

One of the most important areas of current ecological research is understanding how ecosystems (and associated ecosystem services) respond to changing environments, and thus predicting likely changes in ecological communities in the future. However, almost all this large research effort remains highly speculative because of (1) lack of appropriate empirical data and (2) failure to account for important influences on ecological change.Problem (1) results from the fact that recent climate change has typically been much smaller (<1 degrees C) than the change expected by 2100 (~5 degrees C). Therefore empirical validation of predictions is lacking (Vellend et al., 2017, Ecology). Regarding problem (2), it is increasingly appreciated that geodiversity (the variety of abiotic nature) affects biodiversity (Bailey et al., 2017, Global Ecology and Biogeography). Indeed, the well-established concept of Conserving Nature's Stage (CNS) centres on the notion that conserving abiotic diversity is crucial for conserving biodiversity. However, so far, geodiversity has not been incorporated into research on ecological responses to climate change and the CNS concept has not been tested empirically (Lawler et al., 2015, Conservation Biology).This project aims to overcome these two problems by quantifying arctic and alpine geodiversity in areas which have already experienced warming of ~5 degrees C over the last few decades (Schuur et al., 2015, Nature), combining these data with an established database of plant community change spanning several decades. This will allow the first empirical tests of two hypotheses from CNS:(i) plant communities change less in response to climate change where geodiversity is higher;(ii) this pattern is observed universally across plant functional types (eg. Shrubs, grasses)Improved understanding of the role abiotic processes and features play in mediating ecosystem responses to past climate change will significantly improve our ability to predict responses to future environmental change, and associated risks - thus improving adaptation and mitigation strategies.

当前生态研究最重要的领域之一是了解生态系统（以及相关的生态系统服务）如何响应不断变化的环境，从而预测未来生态群落可能发生的变化。然而，由于(1)缺乏适当的经验数据和(2)未能解释对生态变化的重要影响，几乎所有这些大型研究工作仍然具有高度的推测性。问题(1)是由于最近的气候变化通常比预计到2100年的变化（~5摄氏度）小得多（<1摄氏度）。因此，缺乏预测的实证验证（Vellend et al., 2017, Ecology）。关于问题(2)，人们越来越认识到地质多样性（非生物性质的多样性）影响生物多样性（Bailey et al., 2017, Global Ecology and Biogeography）。事实上，保护自然阶段（CNS）这一公认概念的核心是保护非生物多样性对保护生物多样性至关重要。然而，到目前为止，地质多样性尚未被纳入气候变化的生态响应研究，CNS概念尚未得到实证检验（Lawler et al., 2015, Conservation Biology）。该项目旨在通过量化北极和高山地区的地质多样性来克服这两个问题，这些地区在过去几十年中已经经历了~5摄氏度的变暖（Schuur等人，2015,Nature），将这些数据与建立的植物群落变化数据库相结合，跨越几十年。这将允许对CNS的两个假设进行首次实证检验：(i)在地理多样性较高的地方，植物群落对气候变化的响应较小；（ii）这种模式在植物功能类型中普遍存在(例如；加深对非生物过程和特征在调节生态系统对过去气候变化的反应中所起作用的了解，将大大提高我们预测对未来环境变化和相关风险的反应的能力，从而改进适应和减缓战略。