Using a suture zone to gain direct insight into the community-wide impacts of climate change

ended

COMMTACT is a novel, interdisciplinary research project that will bridge fundamental gaps in our knowledge about how species and communities are impacted by changing climates. Given the threats posed to natural ecosystems and their biodiversity, defining and predicting the impacts of anthropogenic climate change is a top priority of conservation and management organizations in the European Union and worldwide. By providing a platform for integrating the skillsets of the researcher (S. Stankowski) and supervisor (B. Emerson), COMMTACT will take a highly innovative, interdisciplinary approach to this problem. From a scientific perspective, the aim of the action is to provide detailed, community-wide insight into the genomic, demographic, spatial and temporal impacts of an altered climatic regime that can be used to predict future impacts of climate change. This will be achieved by combining a powerful natural climate change experiment on the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) with an integrative work plan consisting of (i) community wide-genomic datasets, (ii) spatially-explicit modeling and analyses, and (iii) laboratory experiments. Through these methods, the action will address several untested hypotheses about how different biological factors influence species sensitivity to climate change. The results will contribute to a general understanding of how climate shapes species diversity and distributions, and will inform efforts to predict, mitigate and manage its negative effects.