NKFIH KKP 144068 (2022–2027)
Three Levels Of Biodiversity Insurance: Species Dispersal, -Establishment And -Assembly
Project leader: Török Péter
To address the response of biodiversity to global change, investigating the dynamical processes which structure natural and semi-natural ecosystems is a pivotal task. In the current proposal we study biodiversity patterns and functional trait composition of multiple primary producer groups (terrestrial and aquatic plants, phytoplankton and benthic diatoms) in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. In the research we aim at to analyse three segments of biodiversity insurance supplementing the theory of spatial insurance. First, we focus on the processes operating at the landscape-scale labelled as landscape-scale insurance. We study here the effects of landscape-scale habitat configuration and complexity and the abundance of identical habitats on the species and functional diversity of local habitats. Second, we focus on the habitat level abiotic and biotic processes of species filtering, including compositional and abundance changes induced by various forms of disturbance and stress labelled as local insurance. Finally, we incorporate a third temporal aspect of biodiversity insurance labelled as temporal insurance. We study here successional changes related to community resistance and resilience, influence of historical biotic legacy in form of ecological memory, and other temporal aspects of biodiversity change related to colonisation credit and extinction debt. The proposed research helps to focus practical demand-driven research on community functioning and to redefine several theories explaining colonisation, establishment, and assembly with complex multi-scale analyses.