BIOCOMPLEXITY--INCUBATION ACTIVITY: Linking Ecology, Physiology and Climate Change: Influence of Environmental Stress on Community Structure in the Rocky Intertidal

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The goal is to create a collaborative, multi-investigator consortium to address the complex question of how environmental stress is transduced through organisms to influence their distribution in both time and space. The study system is the rocky intertidal habitat of the northeast Pacific, an environment that is one of the most stressful and physiologically challenging on Earth. During field experiments on the U.S. coast of the northeast Pacific, data will be collected to generate a predictive model of the interaction of physiological stress, climate and community structure in the rocky intertidal zone. The project integrates the effort of four scientists: an ecological physiologist (Helmuth), an integrative and molecular physiologist (Hofmann), a computational/mathematical ecologist (Kinzig) and a community ecologist (Menge). Three specific incubation activities are included: (1) Travel to meetings to plan the project and integrate the components of the project, (2) development of techniques essential to the success of a full proposal and (3) the recruitment of a climatologist to the project to assist with modeling small-scale weather patterns at the intertidal field sites. The project also includes a training component. Graduate students will be involved in one of the planning meetings and will assist in developing the new techniques required for the full proposal. These techniques include: optimization of the use of an infrared camera to record body temperatures of individual animals, development of a biochemical analyses of stress proteins that will allow high through-put processing and the development of a GIS-based model for the project. This collaboration meets the criteria established for the Biocomplexity theme and stands to contribute greatly to scientific understanding of the interaction of organisms with their environment and the biological consequences of changes induced by natural or anthropogenic forces.