| Project Detail |
Understanding amphibian resilience mechanisms to climate change Climate change poses significant challenges to wildlife, particularly during the early life stages of animals like amphibians. Adverse developmental conditions can impact survival rates. Understanding how amphibians cope with environmental stress is crucial for predicting population responses. Supported by the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme, the AMPHISTRESS project investigates how early-life stress affects amphibians’ resilience to climate change. It explores the relationship between environmental change, behaviour, and stress physiology using an interdisciplinary approach. The project studies the impact of sub-optimal developmental conditions on hormone levels, oxidative stress, growth, and stress responsiveness in amphibian larvae. It also examines movement behaviour and develops models to understand how individual stress responses to climate change may affect population dynamics. Climate change imposes a myriad of environmental stressors to wildlife that are particularly challenging to early life-stages in animals with complex life histories such as amphibians. Poor developmental conditions have been shown to impact survival later in life. As amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate class, identifying mechanisms that shape their capacity to cope with environmental stress is vital for predicting population responses. In AMPHISTRESS, I aim to investigate how early-life stress can affect resilience to climate change in amphibians by exploring the underlying neuroendocrine and physiological mechanisms mediating the interplay between environmental change, behaviour, and stress physiology. Hereto, I will employ an interdisciplinary approach exposing amphibian larvae to sub-optimal developmental conditions (elevated temperature, pond drying, hypoxia) and first assess the resulting impact on glucocorticoid “stress” hormone levels, oxidative stress, animal personality/coping style, growth, and short-term stress responsiveness before and after metamorphosis. Then, I will assess the movement behaviour of juveniles toads under semi-natural conditions to understand if early-life stress-induced altered growth trajectories interact with dispersal capacity. Lastly, I will build heuristic models to identify how individual stress-responses to climate change can scale up to affect population dynamics. AMPHISTRESS will provide novel information on the effects of climate change-induced habitat alterations on amphibians, and the importance of habitat connectivity for amphibian dispersal, survival, and population persistence thereby generating knowledge with direct conservation value. Finally, this project will be the cornerstone of my long-term research goals to link developmental conditions and life-history trajectories in an eco-evolutionary framework and would provide me with a unique opportunity to strengthen my scientific profile to advance my career. |
