Collaborative Research: Incorporating Biotic Interactions into models of species assemblages under climate change: A comparison of single-species and community-level approaches

生物群落对环境变化的反应既取决于个体物种的容忍度，也取决于物种之间的相互作用，如竞争、捕食和互惠共生。然而，在了解生物相互作用如何影响物种分布或将其影响纳入区域到大陆尺度的物种组合模型方面进展甚微。该项目将开发和测试新的方法，通过计算物种共生模式来考虑物种相互作用，以预测物种和生物群落如何应对气候变化。在过去21000年里，北美东部植物和哺乳动物分布的变化将与对过去气候的独立模拟相结合，以研究物种相互作用的强度和方向如何在广泛的地区和气候变化中变化。这些数据和分析还将用于测试考虑物种共同发生的生态模型是否比现有的单独模拟物种的方法具有更好的预测能力，并确定我们预测生物群落如何应对未来气候变化的能力可能存在的限制。研究结果将有助于解决理解气候变化如何改变自然系统及其相关生态系统服务这一重大挑战。除了提供物种相互作用如何影响生物群落对气候变化的响应以及我们预测这些响应的能力的重要见解之外，该项目还将为本科生和研究生以及全球变化生态学，古生态学和统计建模的早期职业科学家提供跨学科培训。少数族裔和第一代本科生将通过弗罗斯特堡州立大学和加州大学默塞德分校的校园项目招收。对农村社区的公共宣传将通过公共讲座和在服务不足地区的开放日活动的参与进行。为了支持开放、可复制的科学，所有出版物、数据集和计算机代码都将公开提供。

How biological communities respond to environmental change is determined both by the tolerances of individual species and by interactions among species, such as competition, predation, and mutualism. However, little progress has been made in understanding how biotic interactions influence species distributions or in incorporating their effects into models of species assemblages at regional to continental scales. This project will develop and test new methods that consider species interactions by accounting for patterns of species co-occurrence to predict how species and biological communities respond to changes in climate. Observed changes in the distributions of plants and mammals in eastern North America during the last 21,000 years will be combined with independent simulations of past climates to examine how the strength and direction of species interactions vary across broad regions and in response to changes in climate. These data and analyses will also be used to test whether ecological models that consider species co-occurrences have a better predictive ability than existing approaches that model species individually and to identify possible limits to our ability to predict how biological communities may respond to future changes in climate. Results will help address the grand challenge of understanding how changes in climate alter natural systems and their associated ecosystem services. Beyond providing important insights into how species interactions influence the response of biological communities to changes in climate and our ability to predict these responses, this project will also provide cross-disciplinary training of undergraduate and graduate students and early-career scientists in global change ecology, paleoecology, and statistical modeling. Minority and first-generation undergraduate students will be recruited through campus programs at Frostburg State University and the University of California-Merced. Public outreach to rural communities will be conducted through public lectures and engagements at open house events in an underserved region. In support of open, reproducible science, all publications, datasets, and computer code will be made publicly available.