Tipo | Starting Grant |
Acrónimo | INERTIA |
Título | Integrating ecosystem resilience around thresholds in aridity: unveiling nature-based mechanisms to endure abrupt desertification |
Panel | LS8 |
Fecha de inicio | |
Duración | 60 meses |
Financiación | 1,499,950.00 € |
Ficha | Acceder a la ficha completa del proyecto |
Resilience, the ability of ecosystems to withstand disturbances without losing their structural or functional properties, is crucial for adapting to climate change, especially in drylands where increased aridity poses significant challenges. These ecosystems often undergo abrupt changes once certain aridity thresholds are crossed, yet our understanding of the factors influencing resilience around these thresholds remains limited. This gap impedes our ability to effectively monitor, preserve, and restore degraded ecosystems under climate change.
The project INERTIA aims to address these challenges by integrating long-term experiments, remote sensing, multiple spatiotemporal scales, and global field surveys. It seeks to comprehensively study resilience across different levels of ecosystem organization around global aridity thresholds. Specifically, the objectives include:1) Evaluating the multifaceted nature of resilience to enhance remote sensing monitoring techniques. 2) Unveiling drivers of resilience at global scales across various levels of organization—from climatic factors to physiological processes—particularly around aridity thresholds. 3) Assessing and enhancing our capability to restore ecosystems that have crossed aridity thresholds.
Through these efforts, INERTIA aims to advance our understanding of resilience and its application in monitoring, mitigating, and recovering from abrupt ecosystem shifts triggered by increasing aridity due to climate change. This knowledge could support international efforts to combat global change, desertification, and the restoration of degraded drylands, while also fostering new research avenues in ecology focused on ecosystems nearing critical thresholds.