Photo by Tamara Münkemüller
Overview
Climate change affects plants across levels of biological organization, from individuals and populations to communities and ecosystem processes. In this project, I use whole-community transplant experiments to study how plant responses to climate change unfold over time. By moving intact plant communities across climatic gradients, these experiments allow direct quantification of response rates, delayed adjustments, and transient dynamics under warming and drought. This work aims to disentangle population, community, and ecosystem-level processes underlying why ecological change often proceeds more slowly than climate change itself.
Research questions
- How do plant populations and communities respond to climate change, and how fast do these responses occur?
- How do community assembly processes change under climate change?
- How do phenology and functional traits change at both population and community levels?
- Can we disentangle the effects of warming and drought through plant responses?
- Do community-level responses cascade to ecosystem functioning and associated microbial communities?
- How do delayed and transient responses shape the trajectories of communities and populations under climate change?
- How do transient dynamics and response lags challenge our ability to predict plant responses under climate warming?
What I study in this project
Populations & communities
I quantify changes in species performance, population dynamics, and community composition following experimental climate change, capturing both early and long-term responses. I examine shifts in phenology and functional traits at both population and community levels.
Warming & drought
By manipulating temperature and moisture through transplants, I disentangle the effects of warming and drought on response rates, response timing, and trajectories of populations and communities.
Processes shaping community change
I examine how population-level responses translate into colonization and extinction dynamics, and how these dynamics drive changes in community composition. In parallel, I assess how environmental filtering and biotic interactions shape community assembly over time.
Cascading effects
Beyond plants, I investigate how changes in plant populations and communities affect ecosystem functioning and associated microbial communities under experimental climate change.
Predictability of ecological change
I assess how delayed population and community responses, including transient dynamics, influence the predictability of ecological change under experimental climate change.
Collaborative framework
This project is embedded in international research networks, the TransPlant Network, which synthesizes data from more than 40 whole-community transplant experiments across the Northern Hemisphere. These collaborations enable comparative analyses across systems, climates, and experimental contexts, and support the development of general insights into the predictability of ecological change.
I conducted the transplant experiment in the French Alps during my PhD at Université Grenoble Alpes with Tamara Münkemüller and Wilfried Thuiller, and later led comparative and synthesis work within the TransPlant Network as a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich with Jake Alexander and Vigdis Vandvik.
Selected publications
- Bektaş et al., Journal of Ecology (2021) — Lags in phenological acclimation of mountain grasslands after recent warming
- Bektaş et al., Ecology Letters (2023) — A spatially explicit trait-based approach uncovers changes in assembly processes under warming
- Bektaş et al., Ecography (2024) — Colonization and extinction lags drive non-linear responses to warming in mountain plant communities across the Northern Hemisphere
- Bektaş et al., New Phytologist (2025) — Traits and functions of alpine plant communities respond strongly but not always sufficiently to in situ climate change