OPUS: Synthesizing Ecology with Ecological Networks

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To better understand how earth?s ecosystems such as oceans, lakes, forests and farms sustain the needs of species, including humans, the science of ecology needs to increase its rigor, precision, and predictive power. Such advances will enable a better understanding of human interactions with nature and improve our ability to forecast how environmental change will affect services provided by natural and agricultural ecosystems in the future. To reach these goals, this project will synthesize three decades of the principle investigator's and his close colleagues' research into a predictive theory of the way ecosystems with many species are organized and how they change over time. The core of this theory is based on organisms' abilities to consume resources, grow, and be consumed by other organisms as well as the network architecture of these consumer-resource interactions among tens, hundreds and thousands of species. Elements of this general theory have been published in over one hundred papers, most of which are sole or co-authored by this project's principle investigator. How the ideas in all these papers fit together, including the theory, its foundations, and future directions have yet to be adequately synthesized and articulated. This project will describe that synthetic framework in the form of a book, a review article, visualizations and video animations that define the concepts, equations and computer simulations underlying the theory. This research will also increase the accessibility of ecological network theory to broader audiences, and advance the careers of researchers who are members of groups underrepresented in the sciences.This project will synthesize theory focused on the structure, dynamics, and evolution of food webs and their bipartite subsets including mutualistic and host-parasite/pathogen networks based on integrating consumer-resource theory with network theory and the metabolic theory of ecology. This involves describing the conceptual and computational theory of allometric trophic networks and its application to ecological, evolutionary and sustainability sciences including predictions of the quantitative consequences of species loss, fishing, and climate change. Further development aims to advance a systems biology of ecology that synthesizes ecology by integrating its subdisciplines, especially organismal, population, community and ecosystem ecology, as well as the interface between ecology and evolutionary, social, sustainability, and network sciences. Benefits to society include increasing our understanding of ecosystem management and eco-evolutionary and coupled natural-human dynamics. Two years of research and writing will be conducted involving collaborative visits to international and domestic centers of network and ecological network research.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.