BoCP-Design: Climate change and ecosystem functioning: reducing critical uncertainties about ecosystem acclimation

Utah State University, Logan UT

Investigators

Abstract

Ecosystems respond to changes in temperature and precipitation through many diverse processes spanning time scales from minutes to centuries. The net effect of these processes is known as “ecosystem acclimation.” However, it is unknown how the effect of fast and slow changes will ultimately lead to combinations of plants, animals, microbes, and soils never seen before. This project brings together experts from many fields to understand the slow ecological processes that make long-term predictions so difficult, and to provide new mathematical and statistical tools for learning more about these processes. The goal of the project is to improve long-term forecasts of ecosystem functioning. This is accomplished by reducing the uncertainty from the poorly understood phenomena of ecosystem acclimation. A postdoctoral researcher is receiving direct training and mentorship as part of this project. The Resist-Accept-Direct framework is used to provide options to land managers dealing with rapidly changing conditions. This management framework complements existing climate adaptation planning efforts. The research takes three approaches. First, a theoretical framework is developed to study the functional consequences of lags in ecosystem acclimation. The framework was designed to study ecological change across temporal scales and levels of biological organization. Second, several researchers are bringing together knowledge from paleoecology, long-term observational studies, experiments, and simulation models to synthesize our understanding of ecosystem acclimation. This synthesis benefits the field of ecology by catalyzing integration across biological subdisciplines and research traditions. Processes such as physiological changes, trait plasticity, species turnover, altered disturbance regimes, and long-term change in soil properties are considered. Finally, long-term data sets are analyzed for evidence that acclimation lags are already impacting ecosystem functioning. The analyses of existing data sets demonstrates when, where, and why disequilibria between climate and ecosystem structure are already impacting ecosystem functioning. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.