Abiotic stress alters microclimate by changing vegetation traits
The preservation of biodiversity and endangered habitats is a global priority. A key limitation for this task is the difficulty to identify in advance which goals are currently attainable in a given target area, and what will be the sustainability of our achievements over time in the face of climate change. The assessment of the microclimatic niche of a target vegetation type is a key step, because the microclimate is the actual conditions experienced by the plants (unlike the weather). A major gap in our understanding of microclimate formation is the range to which microclimate is shaped by the vegetation, especially under stressful conditions. Our specific goals are: (1) detecting shifts in traits of dominant species and in the characteristics of the plant community along microclimatic gradients, and in turn, how these shifts alter the microclimate, (2) assessing the thresholds for a change in plant’s resource allocation in response to drought and heat stress in order to anticipate how plant reaction to stress will influence microclimate and species composition in the community, (3) quantifying vegetation’s microclimate modification capacity of a plant community, specifically under drought and heat stress, in field setting and on a broad spatial scale to develop a novel approach for the assessment of community vulnerability to climate change and (4) conduct a synthesis on whether the capacity to mitigate stress is the same as the capacity to alter the microclimate. To achieve these goals we will perform substantial amount of fieldwork in the form of vegetation surveys, manipulation experiments, and physiological measurements of growth and stress parameters while at the same time operating a dense network of sensors to monitor the microclimate in the study plots. Additional climatic and microclimatic variables beyond those measured in the field will be derived through regional datasets, remote sensing and modelling.
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