Biodiversity impacts of managed and unmanaged landscapes in the Anthropocene

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Biodiversity is the foundation of life on Earth. It is crucial for the functioning of ecosystems, which provide us with products, and services without which we couldn’t live and sustain our societies. It is believed that human systems have created a net increase in plant species richness (the so-called anthropogenic biodiversity) across most of the terrestrial biosphere in the Anthropocene, mostly by facilitating exotic species invasions. Moreover, alien (exotic) species increases tend to be associated with native losses and usually exceed them. Together these coupled processes of species gain and loss may be thought of as new global biotic process of anthropogenic ecological succession, leading to the widespread emergence of novel ecosystems across unmanaged and managed landscapes. In the contemporary globalized world, invasive alien species (IAS) have obviously attracted much attention because of the undesirable ecological and economic effects that they may impose upon ecosystems in biogeographic regions, which are not part of their native ranges. For the next five years, I plan to evaluate the effects of alien plants on soil microbial diversity and plant diversity in native and non-native landscapes. This research program will provide a better understanding of ecosystem function and environmental sustainability, in the context of manipulating biodiversity in managed and unmanaged landscapes (inter-and intra-specific genetic variation, invasiveness, introgression, reduced fitness and perceived redundancy), using tropical, temperate and boreal plant species (and their associated microsymbionts), as model organisms. The objectives are: i) to assess the symbiotic status of these plants in their native and non-native habitats; ii) to explain the role of habitat-adapted symbiosis (HAS) and symbiotic modulation (SM) in the ecology and evolution of plant communities; iii) to examine the impact of exotic plants on soil microbial and plant communities; iv) to assess morpho-molecular variation for the identification of traits that confer "invasiveness" upon species; and v) ultimately, to develop spatially explicit individual-based simulation models and statistical landscape ecogenomic methods. Results from these studies will be directed at providing the necessary scientifically sound background information for making informed decisions regarding biodiversity conservation, and ecocertification of managed and unmanaged landscapes. These results will also help understand the functional and evolutionary mechanisms that lead to phenotypic variation and adaptation as well as the phylogenetic limiting similarity hypothesis. In collaboration with the University of Kashmir (India), the University of Antananarivo (Madagascar), and the Federal University of Viçosa (Minas Gerais, Brazil), the project will involve the training of several graduate students at Université Laval in this rapidly developing research area. Therefore, the project is consistent with the research and training mandates of both NSERC and the University.