Mediterranean Shrub Ecosystems Under Climate Change
A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant Response to Abiotic Stress and Climate Change".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 January 2026 | Viewed by 33
Special Issue Editors
Interests: Mediterranean shrub ecosystems; Mediterranean forest ecosystems; drought adaptation; climate change; chemical ecology; metabolomics; photosynthesis; chlorophyll fluorescence; plant physiology; ecophysiology; adaptive genetics; transcriptomics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Interests: experimental climate change; ecology; plant ecophysiology; drought stress; plant competition; ozone impact; ecosystem functioning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The Mediterranean ecosystems are well adapted to a climatic regime generally characterized by hot and dry summers and cool and rainy winters (275–900 mm of annual precipitation). These ecosystems are constituted of mainly broadleaved and sclerophyllous trees and shrubs or shrub-like plants, often evergreen, and cover an area of about 1.8 million km2, with more than half being around the Mediterranean Sea and its islands. In the Mediterranean, we currently encounter climatic issues such as a drop in precipitation (20–30%) and an increase in temperature, which are predicted to become more severe by the end of this century and to exceed the environmental conditions inherent to the Holocene.
The Mediterranean region is one of the world's biodiversity hotspots and displays a wide variety of shrubland ecosystems. It hosts about 25 000 plant species, half of which are endemic. This biodiversity richness and the complex biogeographical and functional characterization issues make conservation a great challenge. Typical hazards are the impact of fire and its frequency on Mediterranean ecosystems and the unknown ways in which climate change will act on biotic interactions. Quite a number of studies have experimentally simulated the impact of mostly abiotic stresses on the biotic components of shrub ecosystems. Biodiversity emerges as a driver to mitigate changes. Nevertheless, our knowledge of how these Mediterranean shrub ecocomplexes will face climate change remains limited.
Accordingly, this Special Issue welcomes original research papers, perspectives, hypotheses, opinions, reviews, modeling approaches and methods with an emphasis on this topic, concerning, in particular, soil microorganisms and fauna, plant–insect interactions, plant–plant interactions and plant responses to changes and extreme events predicted for the Mediterranean. Studies on ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, plant traits, (eco)physiology, biochemistry, plant nutrition and nutrient cycling, and abiotic and biotic stressors, as well as transcriptome, proteome, metabolome and epigenome studies from cellular, sub-cellular, whole individual, field and more controlled experiments, are all welcome.
Dr. Jean-Philippe Mevy
Dr. Ilja Marco Reiter
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- mediterranean
- shrubland
- drought and temperature adaptation
- climate change
- extreme events
- fire ecology
- chemical ecology
- biodiversity
- germination
- regeneration
- allelopathy
- biotic interactions
- litter decomposition
- microorganisms
- mycorrhiza
- metabolomics
- adaptive genetics
- transcriptomics
- epigenomics
- nutrient cycle
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