Set-up for imposing climate warming and heat extremes in free air.

We are applying for the financing of a set-up enabling research into the impact of heat waves and droughts on plant systems. Extreme climate events can have a disproportionate impact on ecosystems relative to the temporal scale over which they occur, yet research on this highly relevant topic is still underdeveloped. The lack of studies addressing important excrescences of global change such as heat waves, is to a substantial part caused by the inability to recreate high temperature events in a realistic manner. Infrared heating has been identified as the most appropriate tool for imposing heat waves in the field, but the controlmechanism to do this in a realistic manner has only recently been developed (by the applicant). The requested funds from the current proposal serve to build a set-up incorporating the infrared technique and the aforementioned novel control mechanism, inorder to start up a project on the role of biodiversity in buffering the impacts of climate extremes. We are convinced that the set-up will grow into a platform which can be used in any experimental climate warming study, and that it will be a catalyst for our research group amid the current emerging attention into climate extremes.

Keywords:ECOSYSTEM STUDY, CLIMATE WARMING, PLANT ECOLOGY

Disciplines:Plant biology