Collaborative Proposal: MSA: Environmental and anthropogenic drivers of decadal-scale changes in estuarine fish alpha and beta diversity from local to biogeographic scales

合作提案：MSA：从地方到生物地理尺度的河口鱼类α和β多样性十年尺度变化的环境和人为驱动因素

• 批准号: 1926391
• 负责人: Lauren Yeager
• 金额: $ 25万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-09-01 至 2020-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1926391&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Proposal; MSA; Environmental; anthropogenic

Preserving biodiversity in the face of dramatic global environmental change is one of society's most pressing challenges. To date, most focus has been placed on biodiversity loss, motivated by documented extinctions of many terrestrial vertebrate species. This focus on species extinctions, however, misses much of the bigger and messier picture of how biodiversity is changing. In many places across the globe, the number of species at a given location has actually been increasing or staying constant, not decreasing - bucking the expected trend. This might be because invasive species or species moving poleward in response to changing temperatures may balance out or outpace local losses. Moreover, species extinctions occurring at regional or continental scales simply may not be well documented in small-scale studies. Furthermore, even if the number of species at a location is not changing, the composition of the ecological community may be unstable. Estuaries (coastal water bodies where fresh and salt waters meet) are places of rapid transformation due to combinations of global environmental change and local factors, such as coastal development. This research will bring together data from government and academic research programs to measure how the biodiversity of estuarine fish communities has changed over the last 70 years across the entire US Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coasts. Fish biodiversity is tightly linked with important ecosystem services like fisheries productivity. It is therefore critical to understand how these environmental changes may alter the biodiversity of estuarine fishes and how expanding warm-water species may reshape coastal fisheries. This project will support one postdoctoral researcher and provide innovative training in statistics, data synthesis, and collaboration. The objective of this study is to identify environmental and human drivers of multiple components of estuarine fish biodiversity (alpha, temporal beta, and spatial beta diversity). This project will leverage time-series data sets spanning up to seven decades from 65 coastal embayments ranging from South Texas to Maine to assess biodiversity trends at nested spatial scales (survey site, embayment, eco-region, and continental). Through synthesis of biodiversity data with environmental and land-use data along with multi-scale and hierarchical models, it will be possible to identify hotspots of biodiversity change, important predictors of this change, as well as relevant spatial scales at which effects on biodiversity are evident. The project will also use a newly proposed metric, community mean range limit, to assess whether increases in warm-water species are driving biodiversity change along major range boundaries.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.

在全球环境急剧变化的情况下保护生物多样性是社会最紧迫的挑战之一。到目前为止，大多数的焦点已经放在生物多样性的丧失，许多陆生脊椎动物物种的记录灭绝的动机。然而，这种对物种保护的关注忽略了生物多样性如何变化的更大和更混乱的画面。在地球仪的许多地方，特定地点的物种数量实际上一直在增加或保持不变，而不是减少--这与预期的趋势相反。这可能是因为入侵物种或物种向极地移动，以应对温度变化可能会平衡或超过当地的损失。此外，在区域或大陆范围内发生的物种灭绝在小规模研究中可能没有很好的记录。此外，即使一个地点的物种数量没有变化，生态群落的组成也可能不稳定。河口（淡水和咸水沃茨交汇的沿海水体）是由于全球环境变化和当地因素（如沿海开发）共同作用而发生快速变化的地方。这项研究将汇集来自政府和学术研究项目的数据，以衡量过去70年来整个美国墨西哥湾和大西洋沿岸河口鱼类群落的生物多样性如何变化。鱼类生物多样性与渔业生产力等重要的生态系统服务密切相关。因此，了解这些环境变化如何可能改变河口鱼类的生物多样性，以及扩大暖水物种如何可能重塑沿海渔业至关重要。该项目将支持一名博士后研究人员，并提供统计，数据合成和合作方面的创新培训。 本研究的目的是确定河口鱼类生物多样性（α，时间β和空间β多样性）的多个组成部分的环境和人类驱动因素。该项目将利用从南德克萨斯州到缅因州的65个沿海海湾长达70年的时间序列数据集，以评估嵌套空间尺度（调查点，海湾，生态区和大陆）的生物多样性趋势。通过将生物多样性数据与环境和土地使用数据沿着，并采用多尺度和层次模型，将有可能查明生物多样性变化的热点、这一变化的重要预测因素以及对生物多样性产生明显影响的相关空间尺度。该项目还将使用一个新提出的指标，社区平均范围限制，以评估是否增加温水物种正在推动生物多样性变化沿着主要范围boundaries.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。