Collaborative research: Quantifying the ecosystem-wide impacts of a strong interactor in African watersheds

该奖项将启动一项由加州大学伯克利分校和普林斯顿大学的生态学家、地球化学家和生态水文学家共同参与的合作研究，研究常见的梭子鱼如何影响生态系统，以及这些生态系统的变化如何反过来影响梭子鱼。值得注意的是，人们对普通的淡水鱼对它们所居住的生态系统的重要性知之甚少，尽管它们被认为是一个脆弱和衰落的物种。河马白天在河流和浅湖中休息，晚上出来在陆地上觅食。通过这些运动，这些大型食草动物将大量的营养物质和能量转移到水生和陆地生态系统之间的边界。这些联系很可能对每种生态系统的生态特性和过程产生重大影响。为了确定这些影响，研究了梭子鱼的运动生态学，它们在生态系统中传递营养物质的速率，这些转移对受体生态系统的生态学的影响，以及环境物理学如何影响它们的生态学。（即河流，降雨量）研究结果将有助于我们了解河川如何影响邻近生态系统的生态，以及气候变化如何影响邻近生态系统用水的改变可能会破坏这些相互作用。更广泛和重要的是，这项工作将扩展我们对物质和能量的转移如何影响整个景观生态的一般理解，如何密切相邻的生态系统相互联系，以及物理强迫如何决定这些连接的性质和重要性。除了这些重要的科学贡献，该项目还将为国家和国际博士后研究人员提供培训，让本科生参与研究，为公众创造创造性的科学媒体，并支持教育服务不足的农村地区的科学推广计划。

This award will initiate a collaborative research effort by ecologists, biogeochemists, and ecohyrdologists at the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University to study how the common hippopotamus affects ecosystems - and how change to these ecosystems in turn affects the hippopotamus. Remarkably little is known about the importance of the common hippopotamus to the ecosystems that they inhabit, despite the fact that they are recognized to be a vulnerable and declining species. Hippopotamus rest in rivers and shallow lakes during the day and then emerge at night to feed on land. By virtue of these movements these large herbivores transfer vast quantities of nutrients and energy across the boundary between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. These connections are likely to have a major influence on ecological properties and processes in each type of ecosystem. To identify these effects, the movement ecology of hippopotamus, the rates at which they vector nutrients across ecosystems, the impacts that these transfers have upon the ecology of recipient ecosystems, and how environmental physics (i.e. river flow, rainfall) influence all of the above factors will be studied.Results from this work will help us to understand how hippopotamus shape the ecology of adjacent ecosystems and how climate change and alterations in water use may disrupt these interactions. More broadly and importantly, this work will extend our general understanding of how transfers of material and energy influence the ecology of entire landscapes, how closely neighboring ecosystems are linked to one another, and how physical forcing determines the nature and importance of these connections. In addition to these important scientific contributions this project will provide training for national and international postdoctoral researchers, involve undergraduates in research, generate creative science media for the general public, and support science outreach programs in educationally underserved rural settings.