Fun2Fun

Forests provide key ecosystem services to society, including the regulation of the energy, carbon and water balances from local to global scales. At the same time, forests and the ecosystem services they provide face increasing pressures, mostly related to altered climate conditions and changes in land use. In the Mediterranean basin, drought is already the main environmental factor shaping forest composition, function and dynamics, and water availability is likely to become even more limiting under climate change. In this context, it is crucial to identify the forest species and areas that are likely to be more vulnerable to reduced water availability, and establish how the changes in forest composition and structure will impact key ecosystem services.

The overall aim of this project is to use the functional trait concept to bridge the gap across multiple ecological scales and improve our capacity to predict where and when dramatic changes in forest ecosystem services are likely to occur. Specifically, we aim at achieving the following main objectives:

(i) To characterize the variability in tree functional traits along environmental gradients at different ecological scales: within species, across species and among communities;

(ii) To put hydraulic traits into a functional trait framework, to assess their variability, relationships and tradeoffs at different scales and to use this information to define overall strategies to cope with drought stress;

(iii) To characterize the relationships between tree functional and hydraulic traits, community assembly and forest function and dynamics, including the provision of ecosystem services. To achieve these objectives, we will make extensive use of already existing databases, such as the Catalan Forest and Ecological Inventory (IEFC) and the Spanish National Forest Inventory (IFN), we will conduct new surveys revisiting a subset of the IEFC plots, initially sampled ~20 years ago, in order to incorporate the temporal dimension into our analyses, and we will use state-of-the art functional models to study niche segregation and community assembly in the studied forests, as well as to make spatially explicit projections of the impact of different climate change scenarios on key ecosystem services (carbon stocks and carbon and water fluxes).

The scientific contributions outlined in the previous paragraph should improve our predictive capacity on how the function and dynamics of our forests, and the ecosystem services they provide, are likely to change in the coming decades in a context of increased drought stress. We aim to provide useful tools to anticipate unwanted changes and design effective strategies (in terms of forest management and land use policies) to avoid, mitigate or adapt to such changes, as well as to design proactive strategies aimed at reducing the future vulnerability of our forests. Transferring this knowledge to the relevant managers and policy makers, as well as to the society at large, is a central aspect of this proposal