Congratulations to Professor Rob Salguero-Gómez, who has been awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator grant. These grants support highly promising mid-career scientists of any nationality and any field with building a research team at an eligible host organisation.
How do living systems withstand the shocks of a rapidly changing world? From heatwaves and droughts to invasive species and human pressures, nature is facing many interacting disturbance regimes unlike anything it has seen before. But predicting resilience remains a key challenge for scientists – which species, populations, or ecosystems will bounce back, and which will collapse?
ResIntegrate takes on this challenge by building the world’s first fully integrated framework of ecological resilience. Instead of treating individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems as separate silos, the project brings them together into one unified vision. Combining cutting-edge mathematical theory, global biodiversity databases, and an unprecedented network of field experiments, it aims to reveal the hidden rules that determine whether life withstands, adapts to, or is transformed by disturbances.
The project draws on high-resolution demographic data from thousands of species worldwide, long-term studies of animals and plants facing multiple interacting threats, and globally reproduced experiments testing how communities respond to real-world disturbances. By linking physiology, functional traits, population dynamics, and community stability, ResIntegrate will uncover what truly makes nature resilient.
The ambition of this project is bold but urgent: to provide science, conservation, and policy with the predictive tools needed to safeguard biodiversity in the Anthropocene. By the end of the project, resilience will no longer be a buzzword, but a measurable, comparable, and actionable property of ecological systems.
Rob says:
“I am thrilled about the great news of funding from the ERC for my project. The consequent ability to see ResIntegrate be born and come to full fruition will finally let us read nature’s ‘resilience code’. By uniting big data, global experiments, and novel, holistic theory, we will uncover what allows life to persist through upheaval, and use that knowledge to better protect the world we depend on from multiple, interacting disturbances.”
