Climecs

CLImatic Manipulation of ECosystem Samples

Due to climate change, the world as we knowtoday is rapidly changing. Temperatures are rising, and both rain events and periods of drought become more frequent, intense and longer lasting. These changes are affecting ecosystems and the services they provide (e.g. food production, water storage, nutrient cycling) in unknown ways. Experiments in which climate extremes are manipulated were hard to perform, but CLIMECS greatly facilitates such experiments by exposing mini-ecosystems collected from nature to realistic climate scenario’s (e.g. simultaneously manipulating temperature and precipitation conditions), to test predictions on how climate change will affect nature in the near future.