PhenoStability-Phenological Diversity of Plants Promotes the Stability of Global Forest Productivity
Name of applicant
Lanhui Wang
Institution
Lund University, Sweden
Amount
DKK 948,077
Year
2021
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
One global challenge under climate change is to ensure sustainable production of various goods and ecosystem services from forests. The role of biodiversity in promoting ecosystem stability remains a core question in ecology, with profound relevance to forest policy. To date, most research on the biodiversity-stability debate has derived from local-scale data from grasslands, with little understanding of how biodiversity can scale up to influence global patterns of forest stability. I propose to test a novel mechanism that vegetation phenological (plant annual leaf cycles) diversity promotes the temporal stability of forest productivity. The objective is to provide a socially relevant global assessment of the extent to which vegetation phenological diversity determines forest stability.
Why?
Mechanisms underlying the biodiversity-stability relationship are still controversial and poorly understood. Most current evidence derives from plot- and local-scale measurements from grass-dominated systems due to their simplicity for experimental manipulation. Thus, it remains unclear whether such effects manifest at the landscape scale and in forest ecosystems, which host most of Earth's biodiversity and terrestrial carbon. Moreover, the global generality and spatial pattern of the strength of such ecosystem stabilizing effects remain unknown, reducing our ability to plan for climate change and increasing natural and human disturbances. Therefore, a landscape-scale global understanding of the biodiversity-stability relationship in natural and human-managed forests is urgently needed.
How?
PhenoStability will utilize a global-scale macroecological approach driven by satellite remote sensing-based big data and advanced machine-learning techniques. I will assess to what extent vegetation phenological diversity (VPD) determines landscape-scale forest stability in a spatiotemporal context of rapid global change, with specific attention to the proposed novel hypothesis that VPD promotes landscape-scale stability of forest productivity. I will achieve this through two complementary and synergetic work packages (WPs): WP1 will uncover the global spatial pattern of VPD effects and their potential differences between natural and human-managed forests: WP2 will examine the strength of temporal manifestations of VPD effects in global warming hotspots.