Timescales of changing species interactions under warming climate

Project description

Understanding and predicting vegetation responses to climate change is crucial to forecast and manage threats to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Predicting plant species responses is challenging because climate simultaneously affects a species’ physiology and demography, as well as its interactions with the rest of the community.

A previous experiment in the Calanda showed that the expected migration of lowland into the alpine with future climate change could have more severe consequences for alpine plant species persistence than climate warming per se. However, we do not know how fast lowland species will migrate and impact alpine vegetation relative to the changes caused by effects on alpine species demography and the altered interactions within the current community.

Addressing this challenge requires simultaneously manipulating interactions among current competitors and interactions with competitors, consumers, and mutualists expected to arrive with warming conditions. With this project, we integrate field experiments warming alpine plant communities with mathematical models of dispersal and species-based and trait-based interactions to address the following three questions:

• How does warming change competitive interactions between co-occurring alpine plant species, and how fast do these changes affect community structure?
• How rapidly will novel competitors from lower elevation invade the alpine, and modify resident plant species abundances?
• How will the arrival of lower elevation insect herbivores and mycorrhizal fungi regulate plant community response to climate change?

We will focus on the timescales of changing species interactions, and thus our research is important for predicting the magnitude of climate change impacts on communities over 50-80 years. Change on this timescale poses challenges for current ecological approaches because of dispersal and competitive lags, yet is critically important to a society concerned about species persistence under climate change.