Evaluating climate challenges across aquatic ecological levels (ECCAAEL).

CIPROM2023/031. Project funded by the Programa Prometeo para grupos de investigación de excelencia de la Conselleria d’Educació, Universitats i Ocupació de la Generalitat Valenciana

Climate change is predicted to decrease the suitability of aquatic habitats in the Mediterranean region through a series of processes like temperature raise, increase of extreme events, decrease in the hydroperiod length and increase in its fluctuations. As a consequence of the latter, environmental predictability will be reduced, posing a challenge for organisms to respond to the new hydroperiod regimes. The evolutionary potential at a metapopulation scale, can be compromised by a reduced genetic variability due to local population extinctions. Climate change will also influence community assemblages in terms of biodiversity loss, invasiveness by exotic species or expansion of emerging pathogens, with consequences for the aquatic community but also for vulnerable species of amphibians and birds. All of the above will project cascading effects on ecosystem processes and functions. Specifically, biogeochemical processes of the different element’s cycles and most importantly carbon balance are susceptible of modification if temperature rises and hydroperiods change as a consequence of climate change, whereas the changes in the carbon balance also influences greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from wetlands to the atmosphere. In summary, assessing ecological consequences of climate change is a multifaceted problem, requiring consideration of all aspects of vulnerability: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.

In this project we aim to study the consequences of climate change on Mediterranean inland standing water ecosystems, their communities, and specific organism that inhabit, as model systems. We will explore the structural and/or functional effects of these changing factors at multiple ecological levels. At the population level we will mainly explore bet-hedging strategies on the emergence into the water column as an adaptation to local unpredictability of the growing season length. At the community level, we will evaluate community structure for a wide variety of taxonomic groups using classical and molecular techniques to relate patterns of diversity and composition to temperature and hydroperiod. Special attention will be paid to the distribution of exotic species and the incidence of selected pathogens, potentially harmful for wetland biota and humans. At the ecosystem level, the functioning of the main activities of the carbon cycle and the carbon exchanges, will be measured both with GHG fluxes as well as using -omic techniques. Finally, the results of the project on the effect of the main ecological factors affecting the different levels of organization of lentic systems, their biological communities and populations will be combined to assess the suitability of measures and make recommendations for climate change adaptation to practitioners and policy-makers and, obviously, will be communicated and discussed with other scientists using the current communication ways in science.