VULCAN -

• is a common European research project conducted in DK, UK, NL, ES, IT and HU
• investigates the effects of climate change on the functioning of vulnerable European shrublands
• aims at providing a risk assessment and guidelines for European shrubland managers
• involves experimental manipulation of the climatic conditions at field scale
• employs a newly developed "night time warming" technique
• was started in January 2001
• is financially support by EU and the participating insitutions
• will run through 2001-2004
• follow up on the previous CLIMOOR project
  
  

VULCAN - the problem:

The climate is under change. The future is likely to be warmer and severe summer droughts are likely to occur more often. Elevated temperatures and extended droughts are predicted to have a large influence on the functioning of natural and semi-natural environments both directly and through interactions with land management and pollutant loading. Thus, climatic changes may have particular strong effects on vulnerable ecosystems such as shrublands, which are already subjected to other stresses such as elevated N deposition, intensive grazing or the risk of fire.

VULCAN - The objectives:

• To assess the vulnerability of European shrubland ecosystems and the rate and extent of changes as affected by climate change.
• To assess shrubland ecosystem responses to realistic changes in climatic variables in the long term using a newly developed and tested experimental approach.
• To investigate the interaction between climate change and other stress factors such as N pollution and management.
• To undertake a risk assessment and construct vulnerability scenarios for shrublands in order to evaluate the impacts of future hazards on these communities.
• To develop guidelines for policy making and management actions for shrublands that may counteract the effects of climate change.

VULCAN - the scientific approach

VULCAN involves field scale manipulations of temperature and water at 6 European shrubland ecosystems (DK, UK, NL, HU, ES and IT) along a climatic gradient in order to:

• Conduct long term experimental manipulations of temperature and water at field scale. Temperature manipulations are conducted as night time warming by coverage of the ecosystem at night with a material reflecting the long wave radiation thereby heating the soils and plants. Drought manipulations are conducted by covering the vegetation during rain events by a transparent cover.
• Quantify the effect of increased air and soil temperature and extented drought on processes driving ecosystem functioning in European shrublands (plants, soils, fauna and soil water). Particularly VULCAN focuses on ecosystems at lower latitudes and warmer climates.
• Relate the experimental results to natural gradients in temperature, precipitation and N deposition.
  
  

Expected impacts

The results of VULCAN will be used to:

• Conduct a risk assessment to develop an expert system (simple rule based model) to create vulnerability scenarios and assess the future risk for European shrublands to climate change.
• Develop guidelines for policy making and shrubland management to counteract potential climate change effects to shrubland ecosystems.
• Generally assess the impact of climate change on vulnerable ecosystems in Europe.