Community Models
Modelling the Species Pool Effect in Grasslands Response to Climate Extremes
To meet the current challenges of mitigating global change, it is necessary to better understand its impact on ecosystems in order to provide realistic modelling tools to help conservation initiatives. Biodiversity forecasting currently uses correlative models such as species distribution models (SDMs) to predict species assemblages along environmental gradients. SDMs are suitable to predict regional pools but are more limited to forecast community assembly.
The development of simple mechanistic models of plant community assembly along environmental gradients allows to predict local community structure from a given species pool. The models are designed to take into account the theoretical developments of plant functional ecology (trait syndrome, CRS strategies…). The aim of this project is to integrate these models into biodiversity forecasting tools to improve their local resolution.
Publications
M. S. Wisz et al.: The role of biotic interactions in shaping distributions and realised assemblages of species. Implications for species distribution modelling. Biological Reviews, 2013, doi: external page10.1111/j.1469-185X.2012.00235.x