BRIDGE

Building a bridge between river corridors, roadsides and field margins: how landscape interactions modulate taxonomic and functional plant diversity

The BRIDGE project aims to better understand the role of local and regional environmental factors in shaping the taxonomic and functional diversity of plant communities established along river corridors, roadside corridors and cultivated field margins. It will mainly use datasets available from the U.K., France, Spain and Italy.

BRIDGE includes three work packages. WP1 will be devoted to the construction of a homogenized and georeferenced database in order to facilitate further statistical analyses. WP1 will gather the available datasets from the consortium of BRIDGE collaborators, and consolidate a final database with additional information from external open sources. WP2 will explore functional and taxonomic diversity and similarity among ecosystems and sampling sites and the importance of particular group species (e.g., invasive species, weeds, …). At a regional scale, WP2 will pay particular attention to plant trait divergence/convergence; testing the effects of the different landscape configurations on the biodiversity patterns (community and meta-community). At the local scale, WP2 will focus on the community response to physical disturbance, resource availability, and spread-related mechanisms considered as the main drivers for biodiversity. We will decipher the relative importance of regional and local scales as key biodiversity determinants. In WP3, we will give recommendations for plant biodiversity management using the properties of the three ecosystems studied. To achieve this goal, we will revisit the WP2 results using a predictive modelling approach simulating specific landscape configurations and disturbance/resource conditions according to a series of plausible future scenarios. We will discuss the benefits for management of integrating simultaneously the properties of the three ecosystems studied in BRIDGE.