CAREER: Computational and visualization tools for translating climate change into ecological impacts

华盛顿大学获得了一笔赠款，用于开发将气候变化转化为生态影响的计算和可视化工具。这些工具将回答这样一个问题：特定的(例如，3摄氏度)气候变暖将对生物体和生态群落产生什么影响？它们将提高学生和公众对气候变化的生物后果的理解，并提高研究人员和管理人员预测这些生物后果的能力。该项目将开发和传播一个交互式网络应用程序，即绘制动物环境压力图(MESA)，用于可视化预测的昆虫体温和热应激区域；极端热应激事件的发生率；我们重点关注的蝴蝶和蝗虫物种的发育速度和种群增长率的指标。MESA的核心将是一个生物物理模型，它将预算昆虫与环境之间的热量交换。这将解决目前生物物理模型无法获得的问题，这导致大多数分析将体温近似为气温，尽管许多证据表明，这种假设可能会导致错误的结论。这些预测将与观察到的气候对昆虫的影响(如物候变化)的照片和小插图一起显示在谷歌地球的界面上。用户将选择探索焦点蝗虫和蝴蝶物种，或者选择通用外温带的大小、形状和颜色来建模。MESA将提供对未来气候变化情景的历史和实时估计和预测。MESA将在科罗拉多州进行原型设计，随后扩展到北美。这将涉及为当前和未来气候开发高空间和时间分辨率的环境数据，以适当量化生物如何对环境手段和可变性作出反应。我们将使用重点蝴蝶和蝗虫物种的历史丰度和分布数据来测试MESA。该项目将开展教育和推广活动，以便学生和公众能够使用网络应用程序来了解给定的变暖如何转化为对生物体的热压力。该项目将开发各种基于探究的动手教育资源，为高中生和本科生提供可视化和解释热应激的体验。项目人员将与当地教育倡议合作，开发教育单元，并最终为国家气候变化教育倡议做出贡献。这些单元将遵循扩大科学参与的最佳做法，项目人员将配合旨在从代表性不足的群体中招收学生的举措。学生将接受生态学和计算方法的交叉培训。该项目将向该机构的科学家广泛传播梅萨？S对热应力的可视化，并通过公开演示。与物候可视化工具等相关倡议的接口将利用该项目？S有助于预测和规划气候变化的生态影响。有关该项目的更多信息，请访问PI的实验室网站：http://faculty.washington.edu/lbuckley/.将建立一个托管计算和可视化工具和教育材料的网站。

The University of Washington is awarded a grant to develop computational and visualization tools for translating climate change into ecological impacts. The tools will answer the question: what impact will a given (for example, 3°C) climate warming have on organisms and ecological communities? They will enhance student and public understanding of the biological consequences of climate change and improve the capacity of researchers and managers to predict these biological consequences. The project will develop and disseminate an interactive web application, Mapping Environmental Stress on Animals (MESA), for visualizing the predicted body temperatures of insects and areas of thermal stress; the incidence of extreme thermal stress events; indicators of development rate, and population growth rate for our focal butterfly and grasshopper species. The core of MESA will be a biophysical model that budgets heat exchange between insects and the environment. This will address the current inaccessibility of biophysical models, which leads most analyses to approximate body temperatures as air temperatures despite numerous demonstrations that this assumption can lead to incorrect conclusions. The predictions will be visualized in a Google Earth interface along with photos and vignettes of observed climate impacts on insects such as shifts in phenology. Users will chose to explore focal grasshopper and butterfly species or choose the size, shape, and coloration of a generic ectotherm to model. MESA will offer historic and real-time estimates and predictions for future climate change scenarios. MESA will be prototyped for Colorado and subsequently extended in scope to North America. This will involve developing high spatial and temporal resolution environmental data for both current and future climates to appropriately quantify how organisms respond to both environmental means and variability. We will test MESA using historical abundance and distribution data on focal butterfly and grasshopper species. The project will develop educational and outreach activities so that students and the public can use the web application to understand how a given amount of warming translates into thermal stress on organisms. The project will develop a variety of inquiry-based, hands-on education resources to provide high school and undergraduate students with experience visualizing and interpreting thermal stress. Project personnel will partner with local education initiatives to develop the education modules and will ultimately contribute the modules to national climate change education initiatives. The modules will follow best practices for broadening participation in science and project personnel will partner with initiatives aimed at recruiting students from underrepresented groups. Students will receive cross training in ecology and computational approaches. The project will broadly disseminate MESA?s visualizations of thermal stress to agency scientists and through public presentations. Interfacing with related initiatives such as a phenology visualization tool will leverage the project?s benefits to predicting and planning for the ecological impacts of climate change. For more information about the project visit the PI's lab website at http://faculty.washington.edu/lbuckley/. A website hosting the computational and visualization tools and educational materials will be forthcoming.