The dimensionality of stability of freshwater ecosystems in a changing world: investigating the biodiversity-stability-ecosystem functioning relationships amidst climate and land use change experimental scenarios

• Grant number: 23/14030-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: March 13, 2024
• End date: November 12, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Ecology - Ecosystems Ecology
• Principal Investigator: Gustavo Quevedo Romero
• Grantee: Felipe Rezende Fernandes de Oliveira
• Supervisor: Ian Donohue
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biologia (IB). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
• Associated to the scholarship: 21/11950-6 - Unraveling the effects of global changes on multiple dimensions of ecological stability in aquatic ecosystems, BP.DR

Abstract

Anthropogenic activities have promoted changes on Earth climate and land vegetation cover and threatened the stability and maintenance of several Earth ecosystems worldwide. In a global change scenario, freshwater ecosystems are considerably more vulnerable given how environmental disturbances and conditions drive their functioning. Recent studies posit that overall ecosystem stability comprises different dimensions of responses of ecosystems to these disturbances. Understanding the dimensionality of stability provides valuable information on the degree of complexity, variability and interaction among these properties. However, we still understand little about how this dimensionality arranges in different ecosystems and how it will respond to this new global change scenario. Here, we investigate the effects of climate and land use change on the dimensionality of ecological stability of freshwater ecosystems and how biodiversity and global change drivers mediate the relationships among different stability properties. In this study, we will use a dataset from a 160-day multifactorial freshwater mesocosm experiment which orthogonally manipulated different scenarios of future climate warming (predicted for Brazil in 2100), nutrient enrichment, and riparian vegetation loss. We will assess several stability metrics (e.g. invariability, resistance, resilience, recovery etc.) of different domains (ecosystem functioning and compositional structure) and evaluate how these metrics individually and jointly respond to the experimental global change drivers. We hope that our results will improve the understanding of the main stabilizing mechanisms of aquatic ecosystems to better predict how the biodiversity and essential ecosystem functions will respond to the current and future global change.