International Research Fellowship Program: Trait-mediated Indirect Interactions: Effects in Community Assembly, Species Loss, Spatial Structure and Diversity-Stability Relationsh

国际研究奖学金计划使美国科学家和工程师能够在国外进行9到24个月的研究。该计划的奖项提供了联合研究的机会，并利用国外独特或互补的设施、专业知识和实验条件。该奖项将支持安东尼奥·J·戈卢布斯基博士与加拿大多伦多大学的彼得·A·艾布拉姆斯博士合作的为期24个月的研究奖学金。在生态社区中，两个物种之间的直接和间接相互作用经常被其他物种改变。这些被称为交互作用修饰或性状介导的间接交互作用(TMII)。这种相互作用在最近的生态学文献中得到了很大的关注，但大多数包含它们的理论模型都集中在小群落和特定情景上。TMII的总体影响以及将其纳入现有理论框架的各种方式仍不清楚。目前的研究试图建立对TMII在大型社区中的影响的更一般的理解。现有的模型和理论框架正在修改，以包括TMII，并探索其对群落组装、多样性/稳定关系、群落对物种丧失的反应以及内生空间结构的影响。这是利用各种假设的组合来完成的，这些假设涉及TMII强度的分布、这些强度与它们修改的直接影响的强度之间的关系、物种与直接相互作用的距离(以节点数表示)与其修改该相互作用的概率和/或强度之间的关系、以及当多个物种修改相同的直接影响时TMII之间的相互作用。还在比较在不同情况下纳入TMII的效果，例如当直接相互作用被限制为纯营养(即食物网)或纯粹竞争时，或当TMII代表特定的生物现象时，如猎物的防御行为或捕食者的适应性觅食。最终，将从真实的生态系统中寻找数据集，以寻找与理论工作发现的TMII最有趣和最重要的影响相一致的模式。该项目的目标是制定一个概括性的图景，说明什么时候TMII可能会在社区中发挥最重要的作用，以及如果有的话，可以对其影响做出什么概括。

0754419GolubskiThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a twenty-four month research fellowship by Dr. Antonio J. Golubski to work with Dr. Peter A. Abrams at the University of Toronto in Canada.In ecological communities, both direct and indirect interactions between two species are often modified by additional species. These are known as interaction modifications or trait-mediated indirect interactions (TMIIs). Such interactions have gained much attention in the recent ecological literature, but most theoretical models that include them have focused on small communities and specific scenarios. The general implications of TMIIs, and of the various ways of incorporating them into existing theoretical frameworks, remain unclear. The current research seeks to build a more general understanding of the implications of TMIIs in large communities. Existing models and theoretical frameworks are being modified to include TMIIs and explore their implications for community assembly, diversity/stability relationships, community response to species loss, and endogenously generated spatial structure. This is being done using various combinations of assumptions concerning the distributions of TMII strengths, the relationships between these strengths and the strengths of the direct effects they modify, the relationship between a species' distance (in terms of number of nodes) from a direct interaction and the probability and/or strength with which it modifies that interaction, and the interaction between TMIIs when multiple species modify the same direct effect. The effects of incorporating TMIIs under different scenarios, such as when direct interactions are constrained to be purely trophic (i.e. food webs) or purely competitive, or when the TMIIs represent specific biological phenomena such as defensive behavior in prey or adaptive foraging by predators, are also being compared. Ultimately, datasets from real ecological systems will be sought out in order to look for patterns consistent with the most interesting and important effects of TMIIs found by the theoretical work. The project's goal is to develop a general picture of when TMIIs might be expected to be most important in communities and what generalities, if any, might be made about their effects.