OPUS CRS Characterizing and deciphering the forces driving long-term ecological change

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This project seeks to understand how local site conditions, landscape factors, and species functional traits interact to affect how species and communities respond to shifts in climate, species invasions, nitrogen deposition, habitat fragmentation, and high deer densities. These forces include environmental change, habitat loss and fragmentation, invasion by nonnative species, nitrogen-deposition (acid rain), and deer browsing. This project will investigate all of these to understand how they affect forest communities, alone and in combination. It will also examine the plant characteristics that affect how species respond and how the impacts of these forces vary over sites that differ in how intense each force is, local conditions, and surrounding landscape conditions. The research team will also compare results in Wisconsin to those occurring in European forests to better understand the generality of the patterns. Sharing results and identifying the particular forces that threaten particular species and forest types will allow us to better protect species and ecosystem changes and manage these to provide ecosystem services. Further, the project will develop a citizen-science monitoring network to provide key data, improving our ability to wisely manage forests and wildlife.This research will synthesize 18 years of research from Wisconsin extending over five community types, 250 sites, and almost 400 species. Baseline data from 50 years ago will be combined with resurveys to characterize and analyze ecological change in detail. It will first quantify shifts in alpha, beta, and gamma diversity for species, traits, and phylogenetic relationships, drawing on recently-developed diversity theory. It will then determine the relative strength of neutral (dispersal-based) vs. niche-based forces in community assembly. This will involve applying both a mass-action model and models based on hierarchical joint-species distributions. With these modeling approaches, insights into how other populations can rescue local populations from extinction as well as the spatial scales at which niche and environmental filtering processes operate will be elucidated. The results from this study will advance ecology and conservation biology by linking large and diverse datasets extending over broad areas and multiple decades to modern methods of analysis.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.