The EU-funded project Plant-FATE aims to develop an eco-evolutionary vegetation modelling framework to assess the responses of biodiverse forests under drought.
The earth is projected to experience higher climate variability in future, with increasing frequency and intensity of extreme events such as droughts and wildfires. Drought is a severe threat to world’s forests, and incidents of drought-induced forest die-back are already being reported. The resistance of the world’s forests to drought will be key to maintaining crucial ecosystem services, such as sequestering carbon and maintaining biodiversity. To understand what plant traits are responsible for drought-resistance, Plant-FATE aims to push the envelope of contemporary eco-evolutionary dynamic vegetation modelling. Accounting for trade-offs in growth via acquisition of resources and resistance to drought-induced mortality, our model will allow plant traits to evolve under realistic drought regimes.
IIASA researchers will calibrate and test the model using data on plant traits and long-term demography available from two tropical forest sites – a wet site from Costa Rica, and a seasonally dry site from southern India. They will then parametrize the model at a wider scale, using available data on traits and environmental fluxes from sites across the globe in different biomes. Bringing together expertise from plant physiology, evolutionary dynamics, and high-performance computing, this approach will advance abilities to predict evolutionarily emergent plant strategies, plant productivity, and ecosystem services under current climatic conditions, and identify species and regions that are likely to be vulnerable to future changes in climate. Our models and methods could potentially be adopted for similar analyses in the agriculture sector. IIASA will provide the perfect platform for research training, and for a dialogue with policymakers and other stakeholders to prepare for mitigating and adapting to climate change.
Project funder: European Commission
Project leads
Jaideep Joshi (MSCA Individual Fellow), ASA, IIASA
Ulf Dieckmann, ASA, IIASA
Collaborators
Florian Hofhansl, BEC, IIASA
Iain Colin Prentice, Imperial College London
Åke Brännström, ASA, IIASA
Funding
This project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship (grant agreement No. 841283 – Plant-FATE)
Publications
Flo, V., Joshi, J., Sabot, M.., Sandoval, D., & Prentice, I.C. (2024). Incorporating photosynthetic acclimation improves stomatal optimisation models. Plant, Cell & Environment 10.1101/2023.07.07.548137. (In Press) Joshi, J., Zhang, L., Stefaniak, E., Dieckmann, U. , & Brännström, Å. (2023). libpspm: A feature-rich numerical package for solving physiologically structured population models. bioRxiv 10.1101/2023.08.04.551683. (Submitted) Joshi, J., Hofhansl, F. , Singh, S., Stocker, B., Brännström, Å., Franklin, O. , Blanco, C.C., Aleixo, I., Lapola, D.M., Prentice, I.C., & Dieckmann, U. (2023). Competition for light can drive adverse species-composition shifts in the Amazon Forest under elevated CO2. BioRxiv 10.1101/2023.07.03.547575. (Submitted) Franklin, O. , Fransson, P., Hofhansl, F. , Jansen, S., & Joshi, J. (2023). Optimal balancing of xylem efficiency and safety explains plant vulnerability to drought. Ecology Letters 26 1485-1496. 10.1111/ele.14270. Heinze, C., Blenckner, T., Brown, P., Fröb, F., Morée, A., New, A., Nissen, C., Rynders, S., Seguro, I., Aksenov, Y., Artioli, Y., Bourgeois, T., Burger, F., Buzan, J., Cael, B., Yumruktepe, V., Chierici, M., Danek, C., Dieckmann, U. , Fransson, A., Frölicher, T., Galli, G., Gehlen, M., González, A., Gonzalez-Davila, M.., Gruber, N., Gustafsson, Ö., Hauck, J., Heino, M., Henson, S., Hieronymus, J., Huertas, I., Jebri, F., Jeltsch-Thömmes, A., Joos, F., Joshi, J., Kelly, S., Menon, N., Mongwe, P., Oziel, L., Ólafsdottir, S., Palmieri, J., Pérez, F., Ranith, R., Ramanantsoa, J., Roy, T., Rusiecka, D., Santana Casiano, J., Santana-Falcón, Y., Schwinger, J., Séférian, R., Seifert, M., Shchiptsova, A., Sinha, B., Somes, C., Steinfeldt, R., Tao, D., Tjiputra, J., Ulfsbo, A., Völker, C., Wakamatsu, T., & Ye, Y. (2023). Reviews and syntheses: Abrupt ocean biogeochemical change under human-made climatic forcing – warming, acidification, and deoxygenation. Biogeosciences Discussions 10.5194/bg-2023-182. (Submitted)