CCSD scientists Iván Jiménez and Adam Smith are collaborating with Tiina Sarkinen and James Richardson of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) in a project entitled Species-level biome response to climate change in Andean South America under a grant awarded to RBGE by the Royal Society of London, the national Academy of science in the UK. The grant, part of the Society’s effort to stimulate new collaborations between UK scientists and leading scientists overseas, supports a travel exchange that aims to build a collaborative research program in biome ecology and evolution between RBGE and MBG. The RBGE and MBG teams will bring complementary expertise in plant phylogenetics, biome evolution (RBGE), floristics, and spatial modeling (MBG) to the program.
The two-year exchange will address a key issue for conservation: the assumption that biomes—complex ecological communities composed of thousands of plant species—will respond to climate change as simple units, and the increasing evidence that plants will react to climate changes individually and in varied ways, leading to the formation of ecosystems that do not occur at present. The project will explore the potential responses of biomes and their constituent species to climate change in Andean South America and will quantify the large variation among species’ responses. It will also examine the ways in which changes in diversity patterns might affect the capacity of biomes to provide valuable ecosystem services such as water supply, nutrient cycling, food provision, and crop pollination. The project findings will be vital to managing sustainable development and use of natural resources in the coming decades. Andean South America was selected as the project’s focus because the region has exceptionally high plant diversity that is thought to be particularly threatened by global climate change, yet very little is known about plant responses to climate change in the tropical Andes.
The collaborating scientists will use specimen data from the herbaria at MBG and RBGE to estimate species’ current environmental and spatial distributions and to model their responses to potential future climatic conditions. In doing so, they will consider whether species with different functional traits (e.g., leaf length, leaf area, wood density) and life history traits (e.g., annual, perennial) will respond to climate change differently or in a similar manner. Using DNA sequencing, the project will also measure the ways in which plants have responded to climate change that occurred in the past, model the evolution of their ecological traits, and then determine whether they have the capacity to adapt to environments likely to occur in the future.