This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In the middle of nowhere, a small island emerges in the Atlantic Ocean. This unique territory completely changed in the 19th century thanks to the efforts of two British scientists: Charles Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker, researchers who stopped at the British naval base and documented the island during their expeditions.
With the idea of "harnessing the moisture of the clouds," they designed and organized a system to plant seeds from the botanical gardens that the British Empire had in all its colonies. Five decades of planting radically transformed the island from a sun-scorched volcanic rock to a rainforest. "Climate change is causing the loss en masse of the biodiversity of all the Earth's ecosystems and, increasingly, we have ecosystems that are prone to desertification," explains Víctor Maull, who has just finished his Ph.D. at Pompeu Fabra University, where he is conducting research at the Complex Systems Laboratory (CSL) of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE, CSIC—Pompeu Fabra University) under the supervision of Ricard Solé, an ICREA researcher at UPF.
Ascension is one of the few places on Earth, if not the only one, that has undergone the reverse process in such a deliberate and documented way. It has gone from being a volcanic island inhabited by half a dozen species of dwarf ferns to a lush, highly humid rainforest, all thanks to a deliberate, human-driven process. "In the laboratory we are working to make minimal models that can explain changes to ecosystems.
Normally, we model ecosystems that degrade, but with Ascension we have the opportunity to understand the reverse process and see if we can invert the collapse," Maull explains. To learn about conditions on Ascension, a team from the Complex Systems Laboratory made up of Maull and Nastassia Knödlseder, a postdoctoral researcher at UPF's SynBio Lab, spent a month on the island in collaboration with its Department of Conservation and government. The team studied the island's transformation from historical, ecological and microbiological perspectives.
"Actually stepping foot on the island reveals the magnitude of the success of the planting process," Maull states. "There, in just 10 minutes, you can go from walking drenched through a rainforest to experiencing the most intense desert," he adds. In addition to this firsthand experience, the team has consulted historical documents held by the national archives: "Nautical charts, logbooks and handwritten letters that explain the entire engineering process." These documents will allow the CSL team to understand how the planting was orchestrated and how it brought about a new biome on the island.
To complete the study, they decided to also take into account the soil microbiome, a structure that the researchers consider the basis of any ecosystem. "The soil changes according to the available nutrients and allows us to identify rapid changes that modulate the ecosystem," Knödlseder explains. Given that Ascension's transition to green has taken place very quickly, "the analysis of the microbiome of different regions of the island can be of great interest to complement the model." These analyses will be carried out in collaboration with the BioFun Lab of the Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Seville.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
