The environment is changing around us at accelerated rates. Scientists and policy makers have come to realize that large-scale international collaboration and global data syntheses are needed in order to understand universal drivers of current global changes. A response to this need was the emergence of several coordinated distributed experiments worldwide in the last decades. In essence, these globally replicated studies are networks of ecologists around the world, who conceptualize the ecological research questions or participate by following a standardized protocol. Because understanding of ecological phenomena often necessitates long-term observations and experiments, data collection is usually replicated not only spatially, but also temporally across several years or decades. Data are periodically sent to the coordinator and groups of participants analyse data and publish scientific papers. All authors are given credit for their work.
A few examples of such global enterprises are: NutNet, the Nutrient Network, which seeks to quantify the impacts of nutrients and consumers on ecosystems in up to 80 grassland sites globally; HerbDivNet, The Herbaceous Diversity Network, studies patterns of diversity in herbaceous plant communities and the factors that cause those patterns at 30 sites in 19 countries; GLORIA, the GLobal Observation Research Initiative in Alpine Environments, targets climate change effects by monitoring diversity shifts in high alpine ecosystems at 121 target regions worldwide. ITEX, the International Tundra Experiment examines the impacts of global warming on tundra ecosystems at more than a dozen sites throughout the world. A recent addition to the list is PLANTPOPNET, the Plant Population Dynamics Network, which is the first to target the long-term monitoring of demographic performance in plant populations worldwide.
Why PLANTPOPNET ? Ecologists use environmental change scenarios to forecast rearrangements in species geographic distribution patterns, such as migrations to track suitable habitats and local extinctions. An overwhelming number of studies use species presences to generate their predictions, assuming for example that if just few individuals are present in a place, the population in that place is doing fine and is guaranteed persistence until conditions change. Such assumptions disregard many ecological mechanisms like local disturbances which may easily swipe populations out of the landscape. To progress further on this problem, PLANTPOPNET proposes to follow the detailed demographic processes of many plant populations globally under contrasting environmental conditions and in interaction with other organisms, measuring year-to-year performance of at least 100 plants per population. The study design will allow ecologists to answer important questions about the environmental and biological drivers of population performance and extinction, how plants adjust their life history strategies in different environments, and what are the demographic mechanisms of plant invasion.
If interested in joining PLANTPOPNET or if you would like to know more information, contact us at buckleyy@tcd.ie.
Authors
Anna Csergo and Yvonne Buckley
Photo credit
http://plantago.plantpopnet.com/
References
Lauchlan H Fraser, Hugh AL Henry, Cameron N Carlyle, Shannon R White, Carl Beierkuhnlein, James F Cahill Jr, Brenda B Casper, Elsa Cleland, Scott L Collins, Jeffrey S Dukes, Alan K Knapp, Eric Lind, Ruijun Long, Yiqi Luo, Peter B Reich, Melinda D Smith, Marcelo Sternberg, and Roy Turkington 2013. Coordinated distributed experiments: an emerging tool for testing global hypotheses in ecology and environmental science. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11: 147–155. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/110279
PlantPopNet, A Spatially Distributed Model System for Population Ecology. http://plantago.plantpopnet.com/