NWO - When nature strikes - Species extinction or adaptation?

Earth’s biodiversity faces major losses caused by global change, including climate warming and eutrophication. Survival of species will depend on their ability to adapt. Ancient lakes stand as “hot-spots” of biodiversity and endemism and often contain Quaternary sedimentary sequences with well-preserved geo-biological information. Therefore, they represent unique ecosystems to study evolutionary processes and dynamics over a long geological time scale. This project will use diatoms, single-celled siliceous algae and among the dominant phytoplankton groups, as model-organisms to study the link between changes in the environment, biodiversity and evolutionary adaptation. We will combine evolutionary palaeoecology and experimental evolution to study and understand diatom population dynamics in the Lake Ohrid sedimentary record, covering ~1.4 Ma. Evolutionary palaeoecology will be used to reconstruct the evolutionary patterns in the fossil record, and evaluate the role of major global change factors in shaping phenotype (i.e. morphological) diversity. Experimental evolution studies will be used to investigate the species-specific long-term, evolutionary responses under different temperature and phosphorus regimes. We will define species sensitivities towards environmental change on two timescales (millennia and seasons), including species ability to acclimate and/or adapt to warming and eutrophication. Integration of results from both research fields will delineate the processes leading to high levels of phenotypic diversity and promote persistence of freshwater primary producers to global change. Together, this project will make a step towards integrating paleo- and microevolutionary scales of investigation, crosslinking generally disparate disciplines.