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

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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.