Trait-based Approaches for Predicting Ecosystem Response to Environmental Change - Empirical Tests and Model Development

Colorado State University, Fort Collins CO

Investigators

Abstract

Ecosystems are strongly impacted by the diversity of species and their ecological functions, yet the species diversity of natural systems is changing in response to environmental change. The main goal of this project is to develop and apply ecological theory to better understand the central role of species diversity for determining the responses of ecosystems to environmental change. This work will use an approach called "trait-based modeling" which has an inherent structure for simultaneously describing the relationship between diversity and ecosystem function and the response of diversity to environmental variability. The project will broaden the usefulness of this approach by resolving a weakness of current trait-based models that deal with only a single trait and environmental driver. The result will allow trait-based approaches to consider more realistic scenarios where organisms have multiple, correlated traits responding to multiple, correlated environmental drivers. Validation of the new model using data from long-term biodiversity studies will test the predictive ability of trait-based approaches. There is a compelling societal need to understand how ecosystems respond to a changing environment, in part because ecosystems provide goods and services to humans (e.g., nitrogen fixation, water filtering). Once the predictive ability of trait-based approaches has been validated with past data with a known outcome, they can potentially be used for prediction of ecosystem response to future environments in many different types of ecosystems.