Research project NG| ECSTATIC
Exploring Causes of Species and Trait Alterations in Terrestrial ecosystems: Impacts and Consequences
Important aspects of societal health, culture and economy are dependent on functions provided by natural and seminatural habitats. Many of these functions are linked to high biological diversity, and are threatened by the ongoing loss and degradation of species rich areas such as grasslands, woodlands and wetlands. Hence, key questions are whether this results in a failure of habitats to deliver benefits to people, and how landscapes and habitats can be managed to best reduce functional losses.
Project description
Some plants "win" while others "lose" as the environment changes, which alters the plant community's composition of species, which in turn affects its ecosystem functions. However, the ecological mechanisms that affect how much and how fast plant communities change are still unexplored. In ECSTATIC, we are working to better understand how plant communities are being altered by human activity.
To do this, we are using Countryside Survey, a unique collection of datasets from the UK that contain measurements of species composition and various environmental variables in 591 1-km2 squares. Data have been collected from fixed locations approximately every 10 years since 1978.
(Among other things) we are working to answer:
1. How stable are plant communities over time in anthropogenic landscapes?
2. What species characteristics are associated with rapid or slow effects due to global environmental changes?
3. Does this lead to a taxonomic and/or functional homogenisation of plant biodiversity?
4. Are the changes of plant communities mainly determined by individual species characteristics, local environmental conditions or processes in a larger landscape context, and how do processes interact on different scales?
5. How can predictions about future changes be improved through an increased understanding of the interacting global drivers that affect plant communities?
Project members
Project managers
Sara Cousins
Professor i naturgeografi
Members
Sara Cousins
Professor i naturgeografi
Adam Kimberley
Forskare
More about this project
Initial baseline analyses show that plant communities are changing in both species and trait composition across a range of UK habitats, with woodland plots showing a particular change in composition.
How have plant communities changed since 1978? This plot shows average compositional differences between communities from the baseline 1978 Countryside survey and each repeat survey year. Increasing differences suggest increasing divergence from the initial state. We are interested in what is causing these changes, and what drives variation in how much and how fast the impacts are seen. Error bars show standard error around the mean per survey, numbers show the number of valid repeat plot comparisons.