Ecology and conservation of plants of the Peruvian fog oasis

Peruvian lomas, also termed fog oasis, are unique ecosystems composed of highly endemic plant communities forming in small fog-rich areas of the otherwise barren landscape of the hyper-arid coastal plains along the Pacific coast. This is an ecosystem with high plant endemism; in neighbouring Chile, around 420 plant species are endemic to fog oases. Due to the necessary topographic and climatic conditions for fog formation and interception, lomas form spatially isolated plant communities, whose connectivity depends on proximity of communities and dispersal ability of pollen and seeds.

Seedling recruitment is highly dependent on facilitative processes, as woody species may induce higher dew formation, thus increasing water availability. This creates a potential feedback loop for the establishment of more species and individuals.

However, both dispersal and recruitment might have been disrupted by humans due to widespread changes in animal dispersers (loss of guanaco, introduction of goats and cattle), overgrazing and the use of woody material by human communities in the past. Moreover, extreme events, such as El Nino, may strongly impact lomas species diversity and composition due to the direct impact on fog formation.

The expected increase in extreme events due to impending climate change will likely impose unforeseen changes to these threatened ecosystems and their endemic species.

Within this PhD the student will investigate ecological dynamics at the species, landscape and global ecosystem levels to inform conservation prioritisation.

Main aim and objectives: To understand biodiversity dynamics in the island-like fog oasis ecosystem, the risks for its flora, and scale up species-level responses to impending environmental change to entire ecosystem threat assessment, which will have a key impact to improve conservation. The project has three main objectives:

Objective 1: Understand and predict patterns in extinction risk of lomas species and gather data on the ecological strategies of lomas species, identifying which are related to higher risk of extinction.

Objective 2: Analyse the role of functional connectivity in shaping lomas plant diversity and endemism and disruptions to this connectivity.

Objective 3: Analyse risk of collapse of the lomas ecosystem innovating on the Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) approach, feeding into a pipeline transferable to other ecosystems, and informing wider usage of RLE, which has been recently adopted as a Headline Indicator for measuring progress towards meeting the Kunming Montreal Biodiversity Framework.