Identifying drivers of ecological change in megadiverse regions to anticipate global change

Amazonian forests provide ecosystem services from local to global scales, and they are currently threatened by the ongoing global change. To anticipate long lasting or irreversible socioecological and economic consequences, a robust understanding of Amazonian forests’ dynamics is needed. Palaeoecology can provide empirical data of long-term vegetation dynamics, as well as pinpoint the nature of the driving forces involved in plant communities’ changes. For doing this, a robust set of calibration of the palaeoecological record in the tropics is required. Here we propose the creation of a professional network aimed to carry out a holistic approach of fossil pollen calibration, to discern the most common disturbance drivers in Amazonia, including human activities and floods.

AMAPOLLEN has been designed around three main activities:

• The monitoring of modern pollen rain in different settings through the deployment of aerial and water traps
• The creation of a large open access pollen reference collection
• The cross check between vegetation plots and ethnobotanical inventories

To do that, international experts from botany, ecology, palynology and ethnobotany have gathered together and chosen the Yasuní National Park in Ecuadorian Amazonia as a case study. Recognising the plant responses that human activities and floods leave in the pollen record will help to accurately pinpoint such signals in the fossil archives. Such information can then be used for characterising early warning signals and the resilience and recovery of these Amazonian forests, thus generating data for anticipating the ongoing global change. Moreover, AMAPOLLEN will prioritise knowledge sharing between the disciplines through regular training sessions specifically focused on early career researchers and centred around the topics of long-term monitoring, new techniques, and global change research.

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