Project: Rapid Adaptive Change

The “Rapid Adaptive Change” project is concerned with understanding the reactions of organisms to environmental changes, a crucial aspect for the management and conservation of biodiversity, particularly in the context of global climate change. The aim is to investigate various mechanisms of rapid adaptation changes in six sub-projects. The basis for this are biological collections from the University of Hamburg and the Leibniz Institute for Biodiversity Analysis.

The methodological approach is taxonomically and functionally broad and includes analyses at genomic, molecular, morphological, physiological and ecological levels in animals, plants and fungi. Methods such as experimental evolution, phylogenomics and network analyses are used. The biological database comes from extensive collections documenting over 200 years of biodiversity. All six sub-projects are based on a data science approach that focuses on processing and analyzing large and complex amounts of data.

Further and more insights into the subprojects can be found below.

Subproject: Rapid adaptive change in insect-spider communities

The first subproject deals with rapid adaptive changes in insect-spider communities, with a focus on community structure and interactions. The aim is to analyze the changes in arthropod communities under the influence of climate change. To this end, biological collections from museums and biodiversity databases are used to compare past and present communities.

A particular focus is on space-time comparisons between different regions of Germany. The aim is to investigate how global change influences changes in trait composition at the community level. The focus is on five taxa with good data availability: Aculeata (gadflies), Araneae (spiders), Lepidoptera (butterflies), Odonata (dragonflies) and Orthoptera (grasshoppers). Functional traits are measured in close cooperation with another sub-project that investigates intraspecific changes in traits.

In addition, functions and interactions that are particularly at risk from climate change will be identified. Finally, the extent to which the arrival of new species in changing communities can compensate for the loss of species sensitive to climate change will be assessed.

Photo: Duhn

Macroglossum stellatarum

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Gonepteryx rhamni

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Nigma Walckenaeri

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Gonepteryx virgo

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Cheiracanthium puctorum

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Odonata

Photo: Duhn

Orthoptera