Scientific biodiversity experiments: design, implementation
SIGNAL will identify and quantify the role of ‘species diversity’, of ‘within species diversity’ and of ‘key species such as legumes’ for enhancing resilience of grasslands, which are spatially and economically important across Europe. SIGNAL will tackle two of the currently most pressing and least studied drivers threatening biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide: climate extremes and non-native species invasions. These pressures can, on their own or in combination, lead to self-accelerating processes and suddenly drive grasslands beyond thresholds of system integrity, induce unforeseen tipping points and regime shifts. SIGNAL will identify a hierarchy of importance of these pressures across the European gradient and produce regionally differentiated assessments of resilience status for informing decision makers. Building on existing experimental sites, cooperating with large European and global research networks and incorporating countries new to the field, SIGNAL will provide an excellent research infrastructure, collect novel data, foster data exchange, interaction and synthesis for the science-policy interface.