COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Biocomplexity and Environmental Change in a Vegetated Estuarine Ecosystem

由于人类的影响，全世界的生态系统正在经历前所未有的规模和速度的变化。同时气候变暖，富营养化，过度捕捞和外来入侵创造了迫切需要了解压力如何相互作用。在全球变化的许多方面中，最不可逆转的是生物多样性的灭绝。因此，了解不断变化的生物多样性如何介导生态系统过程，对于基本生态学和实际预测全球变化对生态系统及其为人类提供的服务的影响至关重要。特别是，群落组成变化的影响往往是通过营养相互作用介导的，因此将食物网生态学纳入溴化二苯醚研究是了解复杂自然生态系统动态的一个重要前沿。跨越这一前沿将需要综合多营养群落的长期时间序列数据，群落相互作用的实验分析，以及新的动态建模方法。这项研究建立在十年的研究在切萨皮克湾鳗草（Zostera码头）生态系统，以解决这一目标。拟议中的研究汇集了一个实验生态学家和生物数学家，采用一套互补的实验，分析持续的长期监测数据在三个营养水平（8年的每月采样日期），和模拟建模，构建和parameterized一个动态食物网模型的切萨皮克湾鳗草社区。本研究将建立的切萨皮克海草食物网作为一个少数的生态系统中，必要的现场数据和实验表征的相互作用强度可用于这种动态建模，促进其作为一个模型系统，探索在一般和应用生态学的问题。这项研究的更广泛影响包括：（1）在几个级别的大量学生，以及K-12教师的实地研究经验，（2）与水质，沉水植被和鱼类组合的长期监测计划的互补整合，以及（3）有价值的长期基线数据，以评估和预测气候变暖对经济重要的河口生态系统的影响，捕捞压力、富营养化和其他压力因素的变化。

Ecosystems worldwide are undergoing changes of unprecedented magnitude and speed as a result of human influence. Simultaneous climate warming, eutrophication, overfishing, and exotic invasions create an urgent need to understand how stressors interact. Of the many such facets of global change, the most irreversible is extinction of biodiversity. Thus, understanding how changing biodiversity mediates ecosystem processes is central to both basic ecology and to practical prediction of global change impacts on ecosystems and the services they provide to humanity. In particular, effects of changing community composition are often mediated through trophic interactions, making the integration of food web ecology into BDEF research an important frontier in understanding the dynamics of complex natural ecosystems. Crossing this frontier will require integration of long-term time series data on multitrophic communities, experimental analyses of community interactions, and new dynamic modeling approaches. This research builds on a decade of research in a Chesapeake Bay eelgrass (Zostera marina) ecosystem to address this goal. The proposed research brings together an experimental ecologist and a biomathematician, employing a complementary suite of experiments, analyses of continuing longterm monitoring data across three trophic levels (eight years of monthly sampling to date), and simulation modeling, to construct and parameterize a dynamic food web model of a Chesapeake Bay eelgrass community. This research will establish the Chesapeake seagrass food web as one of a small number of ecological systems in which the requisite field data and experimental characterization of interaction strengths are available for such dynamic modeling, facilitating its use as a model system for exploring problems in both general and applied ecology. Broader impacts of this research include: (1) field research experiences for a large number of students at several levels, as well as K-12 teachers, (2) complementary integration with long-running monitoring programs for water quality, submerged vegetation, and fish assemblages, and (3) valuable long-term baseline data with which to evaluate and forecast effects on economically important estuarine ecosystems of climate warming, changes in fishing pressure, eutrophication, and other stressors.