Community Assembly Across Scales of Ecological Organization

尽管为消灭蚊子作出了大量努力，但蚊媒疾病继续对人类健康构成重大威胁。然而，在成年雌蚊将疾病传播给人类之前，幼蚊必须在水生栖息地中成功存活发育。在城市地区，雌蚊经常在用于管理雨水径流的基础设施（如路边集水池和排水沟）所创造的小型临时水生栖息地产卵。因此，需要更好地了解雨水栖息地的食物网生态，以帮助解释蚊子的分布和数量。最近的科学进展有可能改变对哪些因素在确定物种分布和丰度方面最重要的理解，包括认识到所有动物肠道都含有复杂的微生物群落，称为肠道微生物组，并且这种微生物群落有可能以意想不到的方式影响动物的生存和繁殖。这项研究将研究自由生活的微生物，肠道微生物组，宿主蚊子和水生食物网的其他成员之间的一系列复杂的相互作用如何导致蚊子生长和存活到成年期的变化，最终影响人类疾病风险。这项研究将使K-5学生参与夏季研究经验，并为本科生提供定量技能培训。生态群落通常作为嵌入式子集出现，但对这些不同子集之间发生的反馈的理解（例如，微生物肠道群落，宿主群落）水平缺乏。下一代测序技术的不断增强的力量，以及解释它的相关发展理论，为生态学家提供了更好地了解自然系统中宿主及其微生物之间关系所需的工具。因此，一个主要的生态前沿和本研究的目标是推进嵌入式生态系统内的社区组装的驱动程序的理解。其目标是量化反馈，这些反馈控制着社区如何在不同层次上同时组装，从临时水生栖息地食物网的重复组装到个体蚊子肠道微生物组的同时组装。两个相互关联的问题将解决使用现场和实验室实验：西尼罗河病毒的两个重要的蚊子载体的肠道微生物群的组装驱动相应的组装的无脊椎动物食物网？微生物群驱动的群落成员增长率差异是否影响无脊椎动物群落聚集？对食物网和聚集在蚊子幼虫栖息地的微生物群落的关注也提供了群落生态学、微生物生态学和疾病生态学之间的联系。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Despite substantial efforts to eradicate mosquitoes, mosquito-borne diseases continue to pose a major threat to human health. Before an adult female mosquito can transmit a disease to a human, however, juvenile mosquitoes must successfully survive development in an aquatic habitat. In urban areas, female mosquitoes often lay their eggs in small, temporary aquatic habitats created by infrastructure for the management of storm water run-off, such as roadside catch basins and drainage ditches. Therefore, a better understanding of the food web ecology of storm water habitats is needed to help explain the distribution and abundance of mosquitoes. Recent scientific advances have the potential to transform the understanding of which factors are most important in determining species distributions and abundances, including the recognition that all animal guts harbor complex communities of microbes, known as the gut microbiome, and that this microbial community has the potential to influence the survival and reproduction of that animal in unexpected ways. This research will examine how a complex set of interactions between the free living microbes, the gut microbiome, the host mosquito, and other members of the aquatic food web, can result in variation in mosquito growth and survival to adulthood, which ultimately affects human disease risk. This research will engage K-5 students in summer research experiences, and provide training to undergraduates in quantitative skills.Ecological communities often occur as embedded subsets, but an understanding of the feedbacks that occur among these different subsets (e.g., the microbial gut community, the community of hosts) levels is lacking. The ever-increasing power of next generation sequencing technology, and the associated developing theory to interpret it, provides ecologists with the tools needed to gain a better understanding of the relationships between hosts and their microbes in natural systems. Therefore, a major ecological frontier and the objective of this research is to advance the understanding of the drivers of community assembly within embedded ecological systems. The goal is to quantify the feedbacks that govern how communities assemble simultaneously across hierarchical scales from the repeated assembly of food webs in temporary aquatic habitats to the simultaneous assembly of the gut microbiome of individual mosquitoes colonizing those food webs. Two interrelated questions will be addressed using field and laboratory experiments: Is the assembly of the gut microbiota of two important mosquito vectors of West Nile Virus driven by the corresponding assembly of the invertebrate food web? Do microbiome-driven differences in the growth rate of community members influence invertebrate community assembly? The focus on food webs and microbial communities that assemble in larval mosquito habitats also provides a link between community ecology, microbial ecology and disease ecology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.