Mechanistic modelling of changing interactions in plant communities facing climate change

Project description

Climate change is causing major shifts in the distribution of plant species and the composition of plant communities, leading to changes in the interactions between currently co-occurring species and novel interactions between plants that previously did not co-occur.

Species distribution models are often used to predict the impact of climate change on plant distributions, but have difficulty extrapolating knowledge of current plant population dynamics to changing interactions. This difficulty is caused by a reliance on statistical correlations rather than a description of the mechanisms underlying climate change impacts.

Therefore, I make use of a mechanistic modelling approach called functional-structural plant (FSP) modelling to simulate changing interactions between plants, as it is a powerful tool to simulate how plants interact with each other and with the environment. This project will see the development of an FSP model that scales from physiological to ecological and evolutionary mechanisms and will be parameterised and validated using a competition experiment that involves a series of plant species assemblages along an elevation gradient in the Swiss Alps, which represent a gradient in climate conditions.

The first step for this project is to develop a model to elucidate what environmental conditions have led to the selection of different genotypes in Dianthus carthusianorum communities found at low (1000 m) and high elevations (2000 m). The model will then be expanded to simulate a more complex community of plant species, with which I aim to elucidate the role of phenotypic plasticity, dispersal dynamics and evolution in driving climate change impacts on plant communities.