Biodiversity is of vital importance for the ecosystems productivity and capacity to provide services to the human populations inhabiting them. This proposal is intended to address major aspects of biodiversity research in relation to the provincial territory: (1) the study and conservation of endangered/endemic taxa (2) the direct consequences to the human population inhabiting this region consequent to biodiversity changes or loss may (3) the study of ecological and genetic mechanisms of adaptation to environmental stress (4) the measurement of the current levels of biodiversity to monitor, preserve, manage and exploit it in a sustainable way.

The ecological and genetic level characterization of endemic and/or endangered species at both will provide the basis for the efforts aimed at their preservation and an important advertisement to the unique natural resources of the region through the popularization of the research results. The assessment of how environmental drivers of biodiversity changes may affect public health by modifying the spreading of zoonotic pathogens or the proliferation of toxin-producer strains of microorganisms in the water bodies will constitute the first applied products of this project.

On the longer run, the integrated knowledge acquired on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems through the combination of ecological and genetic approaches will lead to an improved stewardship of the genetic resources of wild plants and animals, thus providing sustainable models of development able to reconcile the competing needs of human and of natural plant and animal populations.

Additionally, the research will focus on traits that are considered to be the most relevant to adapt to the main environmental drivers of biological stress and, as a consequence, of biodiversity changes. The main drivers of biodiversity change have been individuated among those directly or indirectly caused by human impact (e.g. climate and land use changes). In relation to these drivers, for animal systems the adaptive traits selected are resistance to pathogens, and adverse climatic conditions (e.g., temperature variations), while for plants the research will focus on a wider array of candidate adaptive traits, with the highest attention devoted to resistance to drought and temperature variations. Besides the modelling and popularization of the results, representing clearly distinct activities, two additional activities, conservation and assessment of the adaptive potential have been identified. For operational purposes, due to the heterogeneity of drivers of change, ecosystems and species considered, the latter activity has been split into assessment of the adaptive potential in aquatic and terrestrial environments.

The modelling activity will be shared between two institutions, CEA and IASMA. Through this activity, the relevant data produced by the other activities will be modelled as a function of geography, human land-use and of physical parameters like temperature and precipitation. The modelling will provide the tools to relate the different data to a shared, multi-layered database. The data more suited to this aim will be simplified and provided to the public in form of easily accessible contents of a further web-based database realized through the popularization activity.

This project would represent a unifying opportunity to increase the international competitiveness of the environmental research by creating synergies and integrating ecological and molecular biology expertise currently distributed in various institutions. The contribution of UC Davis as partner will further support both the transition from a traditional to a molecular ecological approach and an internationalization of the biodiversity studies based in Trentino.