Collaborative Research: Adaptation and resiliency of food web structure and functioning to environmental change

人们普遍担心，环境变暖将对物种有害，导致它们为支持人类健康和福祉而提供的功能和服务丧失。然而，最近的科学思想提出，一个物种的不同个体成员，生活在物种地理范围内的不同位置，对变暖有不同的行为和生理适应。这项研究将通过实验来测试这些适应能力的地理差异如何影响个体在迁移到不同温度的新地理位置时保持其功能的程度。这一发现将提高对不同个体在面对环境变化时适应性表现的科学理解。这些新知识可以用来帮助社会适应环境变化，告诉人们如何在不同的地理范围内保护不同的物种，以维持生态功能。这一新的研究方向将加强对STEM本科生和研究生的培训，使他们掌握最新的科学思想、技术和方法，旨在了解大自然对全球环境变化的适应能力，并开发可用于解决这些环境问题的基于自然的解决方案。进化生态学的一个基本原则是，生活在食物链中间的物种通过性状可塑性来最大化适应，以平衡进食（生长）的好处和被捕食者吃掉的代价。这种觅食与捕食风险的权衡可以强烈地塑造群落结构和生态功能。然而，环境压力因素（如温度）可以与这种权衡相互作用，从而使预测其对群落结构和功能的影响的努力复杂化。该项目通过研究一种优势食草动物（蚱蜢）来解决这一复杂性，这种食草动物通过这种权衡影响新英格兰旧田群落的结构。蚱蜢种群对温度和捕食风险的可塑性反应（生理和行为）表现出地理差异，对群落结构的影响也截然不同。该研究验证了高温和低温变化分别有利于行为和生理可塑性的假设。对具有不同温度条件的种群进行的实验室和实地实验将评估(i)可塑性的地理变化如何影响热生理和捕食者躲避对食物链相互作用的影响，以及（ii）长期暴露于不同气候条件后这种可塑性如何变化。研究结果将为研究物种在生态群落中如何改变其功能角色提供新的见解。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。

There is widespread concern that environmental warming will be harmful to species, resulting in the loss of the functions and services they provide to support human health and well-being. However, recent scientific thinking proposes that different individual members of a species, living in different locations within the species’ geographic range, have different behavioral and physiological adaptations to warming. This study will experimentally test how geographic differences in these adaptive abilities influence how well individuals can maintain their functioning when moved to new geographic locations with different temperatures. The findings will improve scientific understanding about the adaptive performances of different individuals in the face of environmental changes. This new knowledge can be used to help society adapt to environmental change by informing how to conserve different members of species across their geographic range to sustain ecological functioning. This new line of research will enhance the training of undergraduate and graduate STEM students in the latest scientific ideas, technology and methodologies aimed at understanding nature’s resilience to global environmental changes, and in the development of nature-based solutions that can be applied to these address environmental problems. A fundamental principle in evolutionary ecology is that species residing in the middle of food chains maximize fitness via trait plasticity to balance the benefits of eating (growth) against the costs of being eaten by predators. This foraging-predation risk trade-off can strongly shape community structure and ecological functioning. Yet, environmental stressors (e.g., temperature) can interact with this trade-off, thus complicating efforts to predict its consequences for community structure and functioning. This project addresses this complexity by studying a dominant herbivore (grasshopper) species that influences the structure of New England old-field communities via this trade-off. Grasshopper populations display geographic variation in plastic responses (physiological vs. behavioral) to temperature and predation risk with decidedly different effects on community structure. The study tests the hypothesis that high and low temperature variation favor behavioral and physiological plasticity, respectively. Laboratory and field experiments with populations having different temperature regimes will assess (i) how geographic variation in plasticity shapes the influence of thermal physiology and predator avoidance on food chain interactions and (ii) how such plasticity shifts after long-term exposure to different climate regimes. The results will provide novel insights into how local adaptation may alter the functional role that species play in ecological communities.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.