Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Climate and land-use changes are the two greatest stressors for global terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem function. Understanding the impacts of climate land-use changes on biodiversity and ecosystem function is central to the theoretical advances in environmental sciences and to mitigation and adaption strategies of human society. My long-term goal is to understand how and why climate and land-use changes affect the diversity and function of Canada's boreal forests. One promising approach is to use natural experiments to understand the mechanisms leading to the changes in biodiversity and function of real ecosystems. In the next five years, by combining long-term repeatedly measured forest plots over large geographic areas in Canada with carefully designed sampling of natural experiments, I will identify the mechanisms responsible for the changes in diversity and function of Canada's boreal forests. My specific aims are to investigate how and why (i) global climate change impacts boreal forest biomass carbon function, tree species diversity, and the relationship between diversity and function. In particular, I will address whether species diversity mitigates negative impacts of climate change (increased drought and insect outbreaks) and/or enhances positive effects such as nitrogen deposition and rising CO2 on carbon function; (ii) species diversity effects on belowground function may differ with stand development; (iii) post-fire salvage logging affects tree regeneration, plant species diversity and carbon function. The proposed work will advance our knowledge of human influences on boreal forests and will train several HQP in the era of rapid climate and land-use changes. Our results are likely to be of great importance in understanding the impact of the two greatest ecosystem stressors on boreal ecosystems and in helping society to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies.