FutureWeb

The overarching objective of FutureWeb is to produce robust projections of the impacts of global change on multi-trophic biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services in Europe. We will engage with stakeholders early in the project to select the most appropriate scenarios analyses for developing biodiversity management strategies and conservation plans, and to identify relevant biodiversity variables. From this, FutureWeb will first produce on harmonized set of available data across Europe (species distribution data, species trait data, species interaction data) for all European vertebrates, as well as high resolution climatic and land use layers for both current and future conditions. Second, we build the first multi-trophic species distribution model that will allow both deriving individual species predictions and diversity estimates. We will apply this novel model on all vertebrate species and project the potential distributions an ensemble of climate and land use scenarios. The final biodiversity ensembles will not only account for the uncertainty given the biodiversity models and data, but also will build on a large range of regional climate models, the full set of representative concentration pathways and the shared socio-economic pathways scenarios of land use change. Third, we will integrate ecosystem functioning in the ensemble predictions via the total energy flux between functional feeding guilds as a measure of multitrophic ecosystem functioning. These will be based on metabolic scaling theory and principles of food- web energy dynamics. In addition to the total energy flux, we will focus on specific functions and services provided by vertebrates. Finally, I will apply novel conservation prioritization approaches that will take multi-trophic biodiversity, ecosystem multi-functionality and bundles of services into consideration. FutureWeb is thus at the forefront of research predicting biodiversity changes in response to global change, their cascading effects on ecosystem functioning and services and the conservation implications of those changes.