Ecosystem recovery dynamics and their response to climate change and habitat fragmentation

Introduction

Global change degrades ecosystems worldwide. To mitigate its effects is the environmental challenge of our age, and restoration has emerged as the main strategy to stem the biodiversity crisis and repair damaged ecosystems. Despite substantial progress on the number of restoration studies and datasets, there is a fundamental gap in our understanding and prediction of the patterns and mechanisms underlying ecological restoration and how they are altered by global change.

Project Goal

The goal of RECODYN is to determine the recovery rates and trajectories of biodiversity, community structure, and ecosystem functioning in complex multitrophic communities, and how climate change and habitat fragmentation – two of the largest threats to biodiversity and ecosystems in terrestrial systems – influence those dynamics.

Methodology

To achieve this, I will use an integrative approach that combines the development of new theory on metacommunities and temperature-dependent food web dynamics in close dialogue with a unique long-term terrestrial mesocosm experiment.

Objectives

RECODYN is articulated around three objectives:

1. Investigate differences between natural assembly and recovery dynamics.
2. Determine the effects of global change – i.e. climate change and fragmentation – on biodiversity, community structure, spatial and temporal stability, and key ecosystem functions of recovering ecosystems.
3. Provide creative solutions to restore ecosystems in a warmer and more fragmented world.

Significance

RECODYN proposes an ambitious integrative and innovative research program that will provide a much-needed new perspective on ecological restoration in an era of global change. It will greatly contribute to bridging the gap between theoretical and empirical ecology, and to move restoration from an idiosyncratic discipline to a more predictive science.

Policy Implications

RECODYN will foster links with environmental policy by providing new restoration measures that derive from our theoretical and empirical findings.