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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Gradual_Change (Gradual and abrupt environmental change: connecting physiology, evolution and community composition)

Teaser

Summary

A major goal in ecology is to predict how environmental changes, including drivers of global change, affect communities and ecosystem functioning, with society demanding answers to these pressing questions. A key limitation of virtually all experimental approaches addressing such questions is that treatments are delivered abruptly, while many changes occurring in nature are gradual. Here we comprehensively study consequences of environmental change when delivered abruptly vs. gradually. In order to understand and model effects of gradual vs. abrupt changes, we need to simultaneously consider physiological effects (e.g. acclimation), evolutionary changes (e.g. adaptation) and changes in community composition and functioning. Even though changes at these levels likely interact, there is no study in which physiology, evolutionary changes and community shifts have been studied in response to a changing environmental factor. This research program thus enters unchartered territory of empirical environmental research in proposing work at this nexus of physiology, environmental change and community composition/ function. We focus on soil and in particular soil fungi, key players in terrestrial ecosystems, testing a range of gradually vs. abruptly changing environmental factors, in a range of contexts. We connect differential responses to species traits, apply modeling and employ data syntheses and literature syntheses. In addition, we also carry out pioneering work on an emerging new factor of global change, microplastic. This work is expected to have transformative character in providing not only new mechanistic insights into effects of environmental change, but will also represent a step change in fungal ecology.

Work performed

We have perfomed a range of experiments comparing gradual and abrupt change in enviromental factors. In one notable case, the gradual change had greater effects than the abrupt change, contrary to what is mostly found.

We have established microplastic as a factor in global change biology, by providing a keystone review paper, many conceptual advances, and some pioneering papers describing experimental results on soil and soil ecosystems. These results have been widely disseminated, and have been met with a lot of interest from the media (print, radio, podcast and TV) and the public.

In a major conceptual advance, we have integrated >60 concepts with a temporal component in ecology, placing them in a common framework. This framework is a nested hierarchical framework recognizing several levels of complexity (from single events, to multiple events to trajectory), and serves to unify temporal ecology. This work places the abrupt vs. gradual focus of the project into a broader context.

We additionally set up up and successfully completed a complex and unprecedented experiment to examine the multifactorial effects of global change on soil, with a focus on fungi. The results suggest that effects of an increasing number of global change factors eventually become unpredictable from single-factor responses, and harbor ecological surprises.

Final results

- We expect to gain much deeper levels of insight into the ecology and evolution of filamentous fungi in general by combining modeling, data synthesis and experimental studies.
- By the end of the project, we expect to have a solid understanding of the effects of microplastic in the soil ecosystem, including how it might interact with other factors.
. We anticipate breakthroughs in our understanding of global change drivers as they act on the soil and its biodiversity, particularly temporal dimensions of these drivers and the effect of multipe drivers acting concurrently.