The global climate is changing. This has been studied during the last 10 years in large scale field experiments with non-intrusive manipulations of temperature and precipitation and at one site also combined with enhanced atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The experiments are placed in vulnerable scrubland ecosystems across Europe and has been part of the EU-projects CLIMOOR and VULCAN and the coming infrastructure INCREASE. Shrubland ecosystems were chosen because they represent an important natural resource, which are known to be sensitive to observed changes in environmental pressures, and they provide a range of services for the society. The poster will present the experimental approach and a summary of climate change effects on ecosystem processes and functions. The experiments combine 2 different approaches to study climate effects on ecosystems. The first approach is known as "space for time" substitution, where the long term effect of a pressure on the ecosystem, e.g. temperature, at any particular site is studied by moving to another site, which is already exposed to the change in focus. This was done by carrying out the same studies in comparable ecosystems in UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, Hungary, Spain and Italy - 6 sites which are naturally exposed to large differences in the climatic conditions we wanted to study. The other approach applied is "ecosystem manipulations", which means that the ecosystem is exposed to the changes in the field by realistic manipulations of temperature and water and in one experiment in combination with CO2. In summary one could say that we superimposed manipulations with water and temperature on existing gradients with respect to the same factors. This combination of gradients and experimental manipulation of temperature and precipitation increases the potential for evaluating the generality of the observed responses to the changes in the climatic drivers.
Climate change experiments in vulnerable ecosystems across Europe
Duce P;
2009
Abstract
The global climate is changing. This has been studied during the last 10 years in large scale field experiments with non-intrusive manipulations of temperature and precipitation and at one site also combined with enhanced atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The experiments are placed in vulnerable scrubland ecosystems across Europe and has been part of the EU-projects CLIMOOR and VULCAN and the coming infrastructure INCREASE. Shrubland ecosystems were chosen because they represent an important natural resource, which are known to be sensitive to observed changes in environmental pressures, and they provide a range of services for the society. The poster will present the experimental approach and a summary of climate change effects on ecosystem processes and functions. The experiments combine 2 different approaches to study climate effects on ecosystems. The first approach is known as "space for time" substitution, where the long term effect of a pressure on the ecosystem, e.g. temperature, at any particular site is studied by moving to another site, which is already exposed to the change in focus. This was done by carrying out the same studies in comparable ecosystems in UK, Denmark, the Netherlands, Hungary, Spain and Italy - 6 sites which are naturally exposed to large differences in the climatic conditions we wanted to study. The other approach applied is "ecosystem manipulations", which means that the ecosystem is exposed to the changes in the field by realistic manipulations of temperature and water and in one experiment in combination with CO2. In summary one could say that we superimposed manipulations with water and temperature on existing gradients with respect to the same factors. This combination of gradients and experimental manipulation of temperature and precipitation increases the potential for evaluating the generality of the observed responses to the changes in the climatic drivers.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
