Format: ORAL

Juliano Sarmento Cabral1,2, Gunnar Petter3, Anne Lewerentz1,4, Zachary Chu2, Jana Blechschmidt1, Stefan Fallert1

1 Ecological Modelling, CCTB, University of Wurzburg, Wurzburg, Germany 2 School of Biosciences, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK 3 Soil Competence Centre, Bern, Switzerland 4 Institute of Geography and Geoecology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

There has been an increasing effort towards developing mechanistic models to understand biodiversity spatiotemporal dynamics and species response to environmental change. This has led to a variety of mechanistic models that vary in their properties, processes implemented and in the ecological level of the agents. This includes models that are niche-based, thus integrating environmental preferences of species, and that simulate agents at lower ecological levels (individuals or populations) across biogegraphical scales. Here, I provide an overview on cross-level mechanistic niche modelling, focusing on recently developed ecological and eco-evolutionary models for plant biodiversity applied to understand and predict species range dynamics across environmental gradients. Featured models are able to depict the distribution of plant species and metacommunities across vertical, depth and elevation gradients, including under natural or human-induced environmental change. These emergent patterns stress how the interplay of ecological traits, spatial processes and local interactions can cascade up to biogeographical levels. This is important, as ecological and evolutionary dynamics at large scales are difficult to experiment in real-world systems, but that can be tackled with dynamic mechanistic models and should be popularized for assessments under non-equilibrium conditions which will dominate the Anthropocene. For this purpose, R and julia packages for niche-based range models are showcased.