The project, for which Christoph Schwörer was awarded an SNSF Consolidator Grant totalling CHF 2.2 million, is called ‘Assessing past and future responses of forests to the effects of climate change using ancient DNA (ARIaDNA)’. The research project will run for five years. Its content: Climate change and biodiversity crises are major environmental challenges. The ARIaDNA project aims to find out whether and how plants have been able to adapt to rapid climate warming in the past. This should lead to a better understanding of how ecosystems react to climate change and help to develop new management strategies. The project analyzes the transition from the last ice age to the current interglacial period. The analysis focuses on ancient plant material that is up to 14,000 years old and has been preserved on the bottom of lakes in the European Alps.
By extracting the genetic information of these plant remains, it will be possible to track the expansion of forests in the Alps, reconstruct changes in genetic diversity and check whether trees have been able to adapt to rapid climate warming. The project aims to contribute to the protection of multi-level biodiversity and to the preservation of fragile Alpine ecosystems and their services for future generations.
“Ongoing and future climate change will lead to the large-scale reorganization of many ecosystems and associated services that threaten the livelihood and well-being of billions of people. To make accurate projections of future ecosystem trajectories and develop management strategies that can maintain ecosystem services, long-term records documenting ecosystem responses to past environmental changes are urgently needed,” says Christoph Schwörer about his project.
Further information:
Project summary
Media release from the University of Bern
‘Sherlock Holmes and Lake Iffig’
(Profile story on Christoph Schwörer on the OCCR website, 2016)
