INDECRUST - Integrative ecological indicators of global change based on biocrust tissue traits

Funding

European Comission H2020 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowships (IF)

Duration

01/03/2018 - Ongoing

Summary

In order to monitor trends in global changes and predict their impacts on ecosystems, scientists and policy makers are in a constant search for integrative, cost-effective indicators of ecological change. Functional traits have emerged as practical tools to track environmental changes (response traits) and assess their effects on ecosystem processes (effect traits). Despite the impressive advances in functional diversity research, traits of organisms other than plants; such as soil lichens and mosses (biocrusts), are still largely unexplored. Nevertheless, biocrust traits such as stable isotope ratios, nutrient content and pH are easy to measure, highly sensitive to environmental conditions and integrative; as a set of indicators, they can reflect changes in climate and nutrient sources and availability. Also, due to their response-effect nature, biocrust tissue traits have an anticipatory character; shifts in their values will, in turn, affect other ecosystem processes (e.g., decomposition rates) and components (e.g., plant and microbial communities). To date, biocrusts stable isotope ratios, nutrient content and pH have been reported for a limited set of species in a systematic way and experimental studies are still scarce in the literature.

The overall objective of INDECRUST is to assess the suitability of biocrusts tissue traits as ecological indicators of global changes and their impacts on ecosystem properties and functioning. This project adopted a multi-scale, hierarchical approach to address the following questions: 1) how variable are tissue traits (i.e., isotope ratios, nutrient content and pH) between lichens and mosses, and among and within species at the local scale? Is soil composition driving trait variability? 2) Are tissue traits good predictors of biocrust and soil dynamics in the future (e.g., decomposition rates, soil fertility)? In other words, can they anticipate global change impacts and feed-backs in the long-term? 3) Do tissue traits respond to changes in climate and atmospheric composition and, simultaneously, indicate changes in other ecosystem components (i.e., soil microbial communities) and soil functioning?

Research group and host institution

This project has been carried out in the Dryland Ecology and Global Change Lab and at the Department of Biology and Geology - University Rey Juan Carlos (Spain).