Dr Jorg Hardege
Effects of Environmental Context on Species Trait Expression in Moderating Projections of Marine Ecosystems Futures
People Involved
Dr Katharina Wollenberg Valero
Project Description
Recent syntheses have emphasized the importance of functional traits, rather than species diversity per se, for maintaining ecosystem functioning and service delivery, and provide impetus to develop functional trait approaches that assess the contributory roles of species in relation to ecosystem integrity. A major short-coming is that these approaches make the assumption that traits are well-defined, constant between individuals of the same species irrespective of environmental context and, therefore, adequately characterize the functional importance of a species. Yet, these assertions seldom hold true and are rarely objectively validated or explored. The assumption that the expression of species functional effect- and response traits are insensitive to environmental forcing is contrary to expectation and means that projections of ecosystem condition for anticipated scenarios of anthropogenic and/or climatic forcing have low confidence because they are likely to diverge from that which is realised. This project provides a comprehensive assessment of the variability in species functional effect and response traits to short-term and long-term forcing for key coastal and shelf sea organisms. Importantly, our empirical investigation will extend across multiple generations to provide new understanding of the influence of acclimation and/or adaptation in determining the contributory role of species. The combination of these threads is exciting, because it will allow development of a next-generation trait-based model that reduces uncertainty of anticipated ecosystem responses to environmental change.
| Type of Project | Standard |
|---|---|
| Status | Project Complete |
| Funder(s) | Natural Environment Research Council |
| Value | £171,344.00 |
| Project Dates | Jan 1, 2020 - Dec 31, 2023 |
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