Principal Investigators:  Mariella Herberstein and Jochen Fründ

PhD student: Valeria Arabesky

This PhD project is part of a research consortium that consists of six subprojects in total. Central to all projects is a data science approach to handle and analyze large and complex data. In this subproject, we want to understand how arthropod morphological and physiological traits are changing under the pressure of climate change. In particular, we will leverage biological collections (from museums and biodiversity databases) comparing past and present communities, combined with space-for-time comparisons between distinct regions of Germany, to evaluate how global change drives changes in species specific morphological (e.g. size, surface area, color) and physiological (e.g. thermal tolerance, critical thermal limits) in relevant species of the following broad taxonomic groups with relatively good data availability: Aculeata, Araneae, Lepidoptera, Odonata and Orthoptera.

Measurement of traits from high quality images will be developed in close interaction with other subprojects of RAC, and will explore AI for image analysis. This subproject will be conducted close interaction with the subproject Rapid adaptive change in insect-spider communities. The outcome of the project will describe any phenotypic changes that have already occurred over the last 50-80 years and how these changes might mitigate the detrimental effects of climate change, in particular global warming.

Foto: Mariella Herberstein