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Habitability space for biodiversity:

applying Liebig's Law of the Minimum to global change biogeography

​Sara Villén-Pérez (IP; Universidad de Alcalá), et al.

2020-2021

Comunidad de Madrid

Predicting the impact of climate change on biodiversity and its distribution is essential to design effective mitigation action and constitutes a central research challenge. A fundamental question is how to establish the climatic space that each species can inhabit in nature, a space that may or may not transcend the fundamental niche depending on the balance of interspecific interactions experienced. This project proposes a new approach to the study of the impact of climate change on biodiversity based on Liebig's Law of the Minimum (1840), whose prediction is that species abundance does not depend on multiple environmental factors but on the most limiting factor. This conceptual and methodological idea opens the doors of an innovative research line in climate change biogeography with global applied potential. Recent results of the research team obtained in Iberian birds and boreal plants guarantee the interest of the proposal. In this project we seek to present, develop and apply this new conceptual and methodological approach by calibrating the procedure with simulated species and applying it to > 2000 species of trees, birds and mammals of multiple biomes and biogeographical regions. The project is led by a young researcher and supported by an international and interdisciplinary team of eight researchers from Spain, Brazil and Finland.

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