MOTIVATe

Much progress on understanding the consequences of global change on ecosystems and the services they provide has been made by functional traits approaches. More recently, empirical evidence is mounting on the role of phenotypic plasticity and intraspecific variation in modulating plant community responses to environmental change. The overall aim of this project is to improve the understanding of how environmental change affects selected ecosystem functions and services in mountain grasslands. To achieve this aim, a new spatially explicit, individual-based model (IBM) will be deve­loped, based on intrinsic trade-offs in physiology, allocation, and life history, and integrating plant plasticity. By explicitly linking com­munity ecology to biogeochemistry, the model will provide a coherent framework to study environmental change impacts on local ecosystem dynamics and key services.