Led by doctoral researcher Nicolàs Merino Robert, the proposal was the only project selected from 16 international applications to the Lab’s first Synthesis Working Group Programme call.
The Biodiversity Futures Laboratory has awarded €9,200 to the proposal Process-based models for biodiversity change at ecological timescales, led by Nicolàs Merino Robert, a doctoral researcher at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN-CSIC).
The call was highly competitive. The Lab received 16 applications from international teams and selected only one proposal for funding, corresponding to a success rate of 6.25%. Applications were evaluated on five dimensions: scientific merit and novelty, alignment with the Lab’s research themes, the genuinely synthetic nature of the proposed work, group composition, and feasibility and potential impact.
The selected project addresses a central challenge in biodiversity science: how to move from models that primarily describe statistical relationships to models that explicitly represent the ecological processes driving biodiversity change.
Climate and land-use change, disturbance, demographic decline, species’ movements and changing ecological interactions are reshaping biological communities. Process-based models can help researchers detect these changes, attribute them to particular mechanisms and project how they may develop over the coming decades. However, existing approaches remain fragmented across fields and differ substantially in the processes they represent, the scales at which they operate and the ways in which they are tested.
“Process-based models are often presented as the next step in biodiversity forecasting, but their usefulness depends on selecting processes that are relevant to the question and can be tested against empirical data,” says Merino. “The working group will focus on that practical problem: when does added biological realism improve our capacity to detect, explain and project biodiversity change?”
The working group will bring together researchers in biodiversity forecasting, macroecology, community ecology, ecological networks, spatial ecology, climatology, Earth-system science and mechanistic modelling. Damien Fordham, from the University of Adelaide, and Franziska Schrodt, from the University of Nottingham, will serve as co-principal investigators. The group also includes July Pilowsky, Juliano Sarmento Cabral, Laura Henriques Antão, Núria Galiana and Miguel Bastos Araújo, representing institutions in Spain, Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and the United States.
The project will be organised around two five-day working meetings. The first will compare existing modelling traditions and examine which ecological processes are needed to address different biodiversity questions across spatial and temporal scales. Between meetings, smaller teams will explore candidate modelling strategies, suitable datasets and possible study systems. The second meeting will concentrate on integration and implementation, including the definition of an initial modelling architecture, an empirical case study and an explicit calibration and validation strategy.
“The objective is not to design a single model that attempts to represent everything,” says Merino. “It is to determine which mechanisms are necessary for particular biodiversity questions, what existing data can support, and whether greater model complexity actually improves understanding and predictive performance.”
Expected outputs include a synthesis of research priorities for process-based biodiversity forecasting, a conceptual framework linking different dimensions of biodiversity to the processes required to model them, and a practical roadmap for developing empirically testable models. The group will also seek to establish the foundations for a collaborative modelling framework that can subsequently be implemented and evaluated with real data. Code, workflows and derived datasets produced through the project will be made openly available wherever possible.
The Biodiversity Futures Synthesis Working Group Programme is funded from the Lab’s own research budget and supports small international groups undertaking intensive synthesis work, aligned with the research priorities of the lab,and that would be difficult to accomplish within a single discipline or existing research team.