Bridging experimental and modelling approaches to predict marine native and invasive hotspots under climate change

ended

The amplitude and frequency of extreme events, such as marine heatwaves, are increasing with climate change in the European coasts. The loss of native foundational species (macroalgae and seagrasses) will open windows of opportunity for invasive species, a major threat to Europe's biodiversity that has social and economic impacts. However, our ability to predict the future distribution of marine habitat-forming species under climate change is yet limited. Recently, physiological thermal limits obtained from mesocosm experiments have been combined with species distribution models (SDMs) to produce more consistent predictions in the form of mechanistic or hybrid models. However, mechanistic models remain mostly untested and the existing approaches do not provide an efficient tool to produce multi-species models suitable to identify hotspots of species at risk of extinction and hotspots for invasive macrophytes. MarHot aims at filling this gap by providing an innovative framework to integrate physiological thermal limits into SDMs in order to anticipate future redistributions of marine coastal species. Thanks to an interdisciplinary collaborative research, cutting-edge mesocosms set-ups provided by the hosts and innovative approaches to constrain SDM outputs with experimental evidence, we will investigate multi-species range shifts in response of marine heatwaves. MarHot will take advantage of recent analytical tools to detect extreme thermal events and the increasing availability of global databases on thermal tolerance limits. The project will provide a powerful analytical framework for mechanistic models and open source software for large-scale prediction of coastal macrophyte hotspots under future scenarios of marine heatwaves. MarHot outputs will contribute to achieving the Development Goals and Biodiversity regulations adopted by the EU, placing its researchers at the forefront of biodiversity conservation in the face of climate change.