The ecological and evolutionary legacy of extreme climatic events for food web resilience (Old ID 27891)
Role
Principal Investigator
Description
There is growing evidence that extreme events such as heatwaves will have the most immediate and harmful effects on plants and animals as the climate changes. This is particularly true for species-rich tropical ecosystems, where recent heatwaves have already caused severe population crashes for some species. We therefore need to understand what happens when whole communities of interacting species are subjected to a heatwave or other extreme climatic event. To understand fully how and why ecological communities are altered by extreme events, we need to carry out experiments simulating extreme conditions and follow the consequences over multiple generations. In most contexts such experiments would be practically or ethically impossible. However, we can design experiments that do exactly this by focusing on a special study system: food webs of Drosophila fruit flies and the parasitic wasps that consume them in the rainforests of tropical Queensland.
Date
01 Jan 2023 - 31 Dec 2025
Project Type
GRANT
Keywords
Biodiversity;Trophic structures;Climate change adaptation;Ecological communities;Heat waves;Tropical forests
Funding Body
Natural Environment Research Council
Amount
117792
Project Team
N/A