Environmental Futures Seminar - Enrico Rezende

Enrico Rezende is a Professor of Ecology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Alternate Director of the Center for Applied Ecology and Sustainability (CAPES), and Executive Editor of Functional Ecology. His research lies at the intersection of ecology, physiology, and evolution, aiming to understand how organisms respond and adapt to climate change. Combining experimental studies, comparative analyses, and theoretical models, his work explores the ecological and evolutionary responses of terrestrial and aquatic species to shifting thermal environments. Ultimately, his goal is to forecast how global warming will affect ecological systems by developing a more robust framework to study heat tolerance and its implications – from vulnerability to rising temperatures across lineages to changes in species’ geographic distributions.

Ecological systems are under increased strain due to global warming and the rise in average temperatures and thermal extremes. Predictive models are urgently needed to forecast which organisms, communities, and ecosystems might be more vulnerable. While many heuristic approaches are currently employed, few mechanistic models predict vulnerability based on physiological knowledge. My seminar will focus on how thermal tolerance landscapes, which describe survival probability affected by temperature and exposure time in the laboratory, can be used to predict heat mortality in the field. This approach allows for predictions of the impact of thermally variable regimes without relying on arbitrary temperature indices. Originally developed for terrestrial animals, thermal landscapes are now applied to other lineages, including plants and corals. I will discuss the implications of these findings and ways to combine this approach with other stressors, microclimatic data, and ecological interactions to predict future scenarios more accurately.