Opening new avenues to model the DYnamics of Species aSsemblages by integrating Ecology and Evolution: a case study from the mountain ecosystems of the Alps and the Carpathians

Informations

Funding country

France

Acronym

ODYSSEE

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2014

End date

-

Budget

254,386 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

The impact of global change on ecosystems prompts researchers to develop new conceptual and modeling frameworks to understand and predict the dynamics of biodiversity across levels of complexity, i.e. from population to species assemblages and from ecosystems to landscapes. This challenge requires cross-fertilization of dispersed disciplines such as ecology, evolutionary biology and the science of the earth system. Predictive models of biodiversity should no longer ignore the legacy of evolutionary history and biotic interactions. We need to know how species have responded to past changes in habitat distribution to understand current patterns of diversity and to evaluate how organisms will track future changes. ODYSSEE aims at integrating ecology and evolution to understand and predict the dynamics of species assemblages at a biogeographical scale. The project will focus on the high mountain ecosystems of the Alps and the Carpathians that represent a hotspot of plant diversity in temperate Europe and that are particularly exposed to severe habitat loss due to global change and land use changes. These nowadays highly fragmented landscapes have undergone severe periods of contraction and expansion over the last two millions years. Moreover, the impacts of Quaternary climatic variations on the spatial distribution of cold habitats have been very different between the Alps - which were largely ice covered - and the Carpathians - which were impacted far less by glacier advances than the Alps. This contrasting history has had profound consequences on the location of thermal refugees, post-glacial recolonization routes, and community re-assembly following climate warming. However, these historical footprints have been documented for a few species, and never for multi-trophic species assemblages (such as plants-soil microflora-soil mesofauna networks). This hinders our capacity to forecast the response of integrated levels of biodiversity to global change. ODYSSEE will build on existing knowledge to assemble an unprecedented dataset on the biodiversity of two types of widely distributed mountain grasslands across the Alps and the Carpathians: the extensively managed alpine meadows dominated by Carex curvula and the more intensively managed subalpine grasslands dominated by Nardus stricta. Different components of biodiversity will be studied including phenotypic and genetic diversity of keystone plant species, taxonomic and functional diversity of plant species assemblages and molecular diversity of soil microflora and mesofauna. This will provide unique opportunities to examine spatial co-variations across levels of biodiversity and across multi-trophic species assemblages. ODYSSEE will integrate our best knowledge of how community assembly is driven by ecological processes (environmental filtering, biotic interactions, mass effect) and past evolutionary history. The ultimate challenge will be to develop and test meta-community models able to track the response of species assemblages to environmental changes in a dynamic landscape. The empirical data gathered in the two targeted mountain ecosystems will be used as a benchmark to evaluate the performance of this new integrated framework. ODYSSEE will make use of key innovative approaches in the science of diversity including (i) the reconstruction of megaphylogenies, (ii) the assessment of soil molecular diversity using DNA metabarcoding (iii) the development of spatial multivariate analyses, (iv) the improvement of community-based modeling of biodiversity. Beyond these fundamental objectives, ODYSSEE will aim at sharing scientific knowledge and methodological expertise among French and Romanian partners and will include an ambitious training program for graduate students, researchers and technical staff of both countries.