SEV-2012-0262 - Centro/unidad de excelencia Severo Ochoa

EBD-CSIC intends to reinforce its competiveness to develop and consolidate a long term work plan on the impact of global change on biodiversity and evolution. This plan will be integrative and well grounded in a solid ecological theoretical and empirical framework, being a major foundation of the centre’s approach in the past decades. Our research program will operate trans-disciplinary on the links between Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology, intended as a scientific response to the current biodiversity crisis. Understanding the causes and consequences of global change impacts on biodiversity, including humans, is one of the main challenges confronted by science (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005. WRI). The complexity of ecological systems requires highly multidisciplinary approaches. To become an international leader in global change studies, a research centre should be able to work at widely different levels. We use two complementary approaches: proactive and reactive. In the proactive approach we aim at improving our capacity to forecast impacts, which requires the use of all available information under current theoretical knowledge and a further development of theory. In the reactive approach, we intend to improve our abilities in solving case-specific problems and focus on broader questions linked to transgenerational adaptive responses under stressful conditions. High priority will be given to the proactive approach, under the medical parallelism that ‘prevention is better than cure’. Our proposal thus strongly emphasizes the development of predictive models, highly demanded by society (Balmford & Bond 2005 ECOL LETT). The general aims for the 2012-2016 research agenda are: 1) Improve our international visibility at species centred research (genes, individuals and populations). 2) Expand our research at the community, ecosystem and landscape levels. 3) Switch from descriptive to predictive analyses, with emphasis on understanding and predicting the response of biodiversity to global change drivers.4) Use larger spatial, temporal and resolution scale of analysis, and broader fundamental questions, providing results of worldwide relevance and general applicability.