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

0754419 golubski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至24个月的研究。该计划的奖励为联合研究提供了机会，并利用独特或互补的设施、专业知识和国外的实验条件。该奖项将支持Antonio J. Golubski博士与加拿大多伦多大学的Peter a. Abrams博士进行为期24个月的研究。在生态群落中，两个物种之间的直接和间接相互作用经常被其他物种所改变。这些被称为相互作用修饰或性状介导的间接相互作用（TMIIs）。这种相互作用在最近的生态文献中得到了很多关注，但大多数包括它们的理论模型都集中在小社区和特定场景上。tmii的一般含义，以及将它们纳入现有理论框架的各种方法，仍不清楚。目前的研究旨在对大型社区中tmii的影响建立更普遍的理解。现有的模型和理论框架正在进行修改，以纳入tmii，并探索其对群落聚集、多样性/稳定性关系、群落对物种丧失的响应以及内因产生的空间结构的影响。这是通过各种假设的组合来完成的，这些假设涉及TMII强度的分布，这些强度与它们所改变的直接效应的强度之间的关系，物种与直接相互作用的距离（以节点数量计算）与它改变这种相互作用的概率和/或强度之间的关系，以及当多个物种改变相同的直接效应时TMII之间的相互作用。还比较了在不同情况下合并tmii的效果，例如当直接相互作用被限制为纯营养（即食物网）或纯竞争时，或者当tmii代表特定的生物现象，如猎物的防御行为或捕食者的适应性觅食时。最终，将从真实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。该项目的目标是对tmii在什么时候可能在社区中发挥最重要的作用，以及它们的影响可能有什么一般情况（如果有的话），形成一种总体情况。

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.