OPUS: CRS -- A Cross-Scale Synthesis in a Disturbance-Mediated System: Integrating Population, Community, and Metacommunity Perspectives

我们生活在一个环境迅速变化的时代，这对物种生存和生态系统繁荣的能力构成了挑战。因此，了解生物如何应对环境干扰是很重要的。该项目将使用长期数据集来确定波多黎各的飓风和干旱如何影响蜗牛和蛞蝓的生活。这些生物可能看起来微不足道，但并非如此——它们通过分解死亡植物和回收营养物质在森林中发挥着重要作用。然而，他们越来越多地受到异常强烈的飓风和严重干旱的威胁。该项目的主要目标是预测种群和物种群如何随时间变化。蜗牛和蛞蝓对环境变化的抵抗力和脆弱性如何？为什么？我们能从他们身上学到什么？除了对长期数据进行新的分析外，研究人员还将综合他过去工作的结果，重点关注发生在不同尺度上的变化，以及这些尺度之间的某种联系。该项目还将通过提供课程，将来自基础和应用环境科学、统计学和地理学的学生和教师团队聚集在一起，共同学习严峻的环境挑战，从而帮助打破学科障碍。综合研究将产生理论和实证发现，整合干扰和演替、跨尺度相互作用和元群落的观点。一个专著将集中于概念的细化和整合理论的干扰和演替与元群落。第二部专著将重点关注人口、社区和元社区层面的长期时空格局。种群级属性包括发生率（存在-缺失）和丰度，而群落级属性包括物种丰富度、均匀度、优势度、多样性和稀有性。每个指标将被分解为基于乘法和加性模型的空间分量，以了解层次空间结构如何响应干扰和随后的变化。元群落分析将整合基于过程的方法（如斑块动力学、物种分选、质量效应和中性）和基于模式的方法（如一致性、范围周转和范围边界聚集），以理解在飓风易发系统中元群落随时间变化的方式。将采用分层方法进行方差分解，以量化由环境特征、未知来源的空间变异和空间结构环境变异所解释的独特变异。将探讨几种新兴的理解时空变化的统计方法，包括：(1)干预分析或分段回归；(2)扩展广义线性混合模型框架；(3)多元时间序列方法和同时推理程序，以适应罕见或罕见物种的泊松或负二项误差项。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

We live in a time of rapid environmental change, challenging the ability of species to persist and of ecosystems to thrive. Thus, it is important to understand how living things respond to environmental disturbances. This project will use a long-term data set to determine how hurricanes and droughts in Puerto Rico have affected the lives of snails and slugs. These creatures may seem trivial but are not -- they play an important role in forests by breaking down dead plants and recycling nutrients. Yet, they are increasingly threatened by unusually strong hurricanes and harsh droughts. The main goal of this project is to predict how populations and groups of species change over time. How resistant or vulnerable are snails and slugs to environmental change, and why? What can we learn from them? In addition to new analyses of long-term data, the researcher will synthesize results of his past work, focusing on changes that take place at different scales and thatare somehow linked across those scales. The project will also help break down disciplinary barriers by offering courses that bring together teams of students and faculty from basic and applied environmental sciences, statistics and geography to learn together about tough environmental challenges.Synthetic research will produce theoretical and empirical discoveries that integrate perspectives on disturbance and succession, cross-scale interactions, and metacommunities. A monograph will focus on conceptual refinement and integration of theory on disturbance and succession with that on metacommunities. A second monograph will focus on long-term spatiotemporal patterns at the levels of populations, communities, and metacommunities. Population-level attributes include incidence (presence-absence) and abundance, whereas community-level attributes comprise species richness, evenness, dominance, diversity, and rarity. Each metric will be decomposed into spatial components based on multiplicative and additive models to understand how the hierarchical spatial structure responds to disturbances and subsequently changes during secondary succession. Metacommunity analyses will integrate process-based (i.e., patch dynamics, species sorting, mass effects, and neutrality) and pattern-based (i.e., coherence, range turnover, and range boundary clumping) approaches for understanding the ways in which metacommunities change over time in a hurricane-prone system. A hierarchical approach to variance decomposition will be used to quantify unique variation explained by environmental characteristics, spatial variation of unknown origin, and spatially structured environmental variation. Several emerging statistical approaches for understanding spatiotemporal variation will be explored, including (1) intervention analysis or segmented regression; (2) extended generalized linear mixed model frameworks; and (3) multivariate time series approaches and simultaneous inference procedures that accommodate Poisson or negative binomial error terms for rare or uncommon species.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.