Wilfried Thuiller

Host Institution : CNRS

Laboratoire : LECA (CNRS/UJF/Univ. Savoie)

Appel à projet : Starting (LS8)

Nom du Projet : TEEMBIO – Toward Eco-Evolutionary Models for BIODiversity Scenarios

Description : 

Given the contemporary biodiversity crisis, effective conservation strategies that offset the threats to ecosystem integrity are crucial for maintaining biodiversity. The development of sound biodiversity scenarios is thus a major challenge for the scientific community. However, current biodiversity models rarely incorporate recent advances in ecological and evolutionary theory like: (i) how evolution shapes species’ niches and ranges; (ii) how community assembly rules shape species’ ranges; and (iii) how these two processes interact to drive the response of populations and communities to environmental changes. Since the considered processes act on the opposing ends of an organisational hierarchy, they have rarely been combined and no model integrating all these processes yet exists. The task of bridging the gap between local processes and macroecological species range dynamics is to build upon theoretical and empirical approaches from evolutionary ecology and community ecology, to extract the processes relevant for higher-scale dynamics and to account for their interactions to generate biodiversity scenarios and associated services. The key-idea of the proposed project TEEMBIO is thus to fill this gap through four interrelated research axes: 1- Improve our understanding on how evolution shapes species ranges at micro- and macro-evolutionary scales. 2- Improve our understanding on how community assembly rules shape biodiversity and species. 3- Develop, analyze and parameterize comprehensive projection tools (EEM-models) that incorporate both evolutionary dynamics and community assembly rules to predict global change impacts on biodiversity. 4- Develop a set of quantitative scenarios of plant biodiversity and associated ecosystem services using two case studies (forest in European Alps and grasslands in French Alps) with a comprehensive assessment of protected area networks.