Project: Geography of Demography: modeling plant population responses to global habitat patterns
Funding: Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship
Timeframe: June 2015-June 2017
Host institution: Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Mentor: Prof. Yvonne Buckley
Collaborators: Prof. Antoine Guisan and Dr. Olivier Broennimann, the Spatial Ecology Lab, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Predicting the locations where plant species occur, or could occur, is a critical challenge for ecologists in the coming decades. As the global climate alters, it changes where different plants can persist. As a result, it is imperative that we understand how plant populations respond to climatic constraints and use that information to predict how they are likely to respond to climatic changes in the future. Forecasts of plant redistributions on Earth due to climate change have been focused on estimating losses in the amount of suitable living conditions. However, another important consequence of environmental changes is the rearrangement of habitats suitable for living, such as increasing loss of connection between habitat patches throughout species’ area of distribution.
Plants support the very survival of the human race. They provide humans food, pastures for livestock, and places for recreation and wellbeing. They also directly and indirectly provide numerous invaluable ecosystem services such as water regulation, carbon sequestration and flood prevention. To safeguard these ecosystem services, we need to provide conservation managers robust ecological models able to identify species vulnerable or resistant to deteriorating habitat conditions or to major habitat reconfigurations.
With GEODEM we examined the geographic configuration of habitat patches suitable for hundreds of European plant species. Our aim was to develop predictive models of how these geographic patterns vary with species’ biological properties and geophysical constraints to the local persistence or expansion of plant populations. The project enabled us to emerge important generalizations across multiple species and plant life strategies over large geographic extents. By addressing fundamental theoretical concepts of ecology, we advanced our understanding of how plants interact with their physical environment. Incorporating the configuration of suitable habitats in analyses of the geographic distribution of plants can significantly improve our ability to anticipate how these organisms will respond to shifting climate conditions globally.
Publications
** joint senior authorship
Conference abstracts
Media coverage
2017: Earning a living in a changing climate - the plant perspective (press release)
2017: Plants under socio-economic stress - Horizon 2020 Projects highlight (press release)
2017: Living in poor climate conditions. A plant story (video presentation)
- Csergő AM, Salguero-Gómez R, Broennimann O, Coutts SR, Guisan A, Angert AL, Welk E, Stott I, Enquist BJ, McGill B, Svenning JC, Violle C, and Buckley YM (2017) Less favorable climates constrain demographic strategies in plants Ecol. Lett. link
- Csergő, A.M., Healy, K., O'Connell, D.P., Baudraz, M.E.A., Kelly, D.J., Ó Marcaigh, F., Smith, A.L., Villellas, J., White, C., Yang, Q. and Buckley, Y.M. (2023) Spatial phenotypic variability is higher between island populations than between mainland populations worldwide. Ecography e06787. link
- Csergő AM*, Broennimann O*, Petitpierre B*, and Buckley Y*, Guisan A*, The geography of habitat suitability (in prep.)
- Csergő AM*, Broennimann O*, and Guisan A**, Buckley YM**, (2020) Drivers of species' geographic range structure in European plants (BioRxiv & in prep.)
** joint senior authorship
Conference abstracts
- Csergő M, Healy K, Baudraz MEA, Kelly D, Kelly R, O’Connell D, Ó Marcaigh F, Smith AL, Villellas J, White C, Wilson J, Yang Q and Buckley YM (2019) A meta-analysis of mainland and island populations suggests a general isolation syndrome affecting traits, demography and genetic diversity. III. International Island Biology Conference, La Réunion, 8-13 July 2019 (link to book of abstracts)
Media coverage
2017: Earning a living in a changing climate - the plant perspective (press release)
2017: Plants under socio-economic stress - Horizon 2020 Projects highlight (press release)
2017: Living in poor climate conditions. A plant story (video presentation)
This website is updated as the project outcomes become available. For more information and collaboration enquiries please contact me at [email protected]. Thank you!