HORIZON EUROPE INERTIA Project: Integrating ecosystem resilience around aridity thresholds: revealing nature-based mechanisms to resist abrupt desertification
- Type Project
- Status Signed
- Execution 2025 -2030
- Assigned Budget 1.499.950,00 €
- Scope Europeo
- Autonomous community Madrid, Comunidad de
- Main source of financing Horizon Europe 2021-2027
- Project website https://doi.org/10.3030/101164015
Resilience is the ability of ecosystems to withstand disturbances, a crucial trait for adapting to climate change and increasing aridity. This is especially vital for drylands, where crossing aridity thresholds can lead to sudden and dramatic changes. However, limited knowledge of resilience in these regions hampers efforts to restore and protect degraded ecosystems. The ERC-funded INERTIA project will combine long-term experiments, remote sensing, and global field studies to investigate resilience across ecosystems, focusing on global aridity thresholds. Its goal is to better understand the complex nature of resilience, refine remote sensing techniques, identify critical organizational-level factors, and support ecosystem restoration in drylands.
Resilience (the ability of ecosystems to withstand disturbances without losing their structural or functional properties) is crucial for coping with changes imposed by climate change, such as the continued increase in aridity. This is especially relevant for drylands, whose structure and functioning have shown abrupt changes once certain aridity thresholds are exceeded.
However, the drivers and patterns of resilience around aridity thresholds remain unknown, hampering our ability to monitor, preserve, and restore degraded ecosystems in the face of climate change. Existing uncertainties arise from the complexity of studying resilience—a multifaceted concept operating at distinct levels of ecosystem organization—and the lack of studies addressing dryland resilience around and across aridity thresholds. INERTIA will combine long-term experiments, remote sensing, multiple spatiotemporal scales, and global field studies to address all facets of resilience at distinct levels of ecosystem organization around and across aridity thresholds.
In particular, my goal is:
- Assess the multifaceted nature of resilience to enhance remote sensing monitoring schemes.
- To reveal the drivers of global resilience at all organizational levels (from climatic to physiological), specifically around aridity thresholds.
- Evaluate and improve our capacity to restore ecosystems across aridity thresholds.
In this way, INERTIA will provide cutting-edge advances in our understanding of resilience and its potential to monitor, evade, and recover from abrupt changes triggered by crossing aridity thresholds. The knowledge gained by INERTIA will support international initiatives aimed at mitigating global change and desertification or restoring degraded drylands and could open new avenues of research on the ecology of ecosystems at the edge of thresholds, a topic of increasing relevance due to ongoing climate change.
- UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID
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