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

面对戏剧性的全球环境变化，保护生物多样性是社会最紧迫的挑战之一。到目前为止，人们最关注的是生物多样性的丧失，其动机是许多陆地脊椎动物物种的有记录的灭绝。然而，这种对物种灭绝的关注，忽略了生物多样性正在如何变化的更大、更混乱的图景。在全球许多地方，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--这与预期的趋势背道而驰。这可能是因为入侵物种或随着气温变化而向极地移动的物种可能会平衡或超过当地的损失。此外，发生在区域或大陆范围内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(淡水和咸水交汇的沿海水体)是由于全球环境变化和当地因素的结合而迅速变化的地方，例如沿海开发。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海岸河口鱼类群落的生物多样性是如何变化的。鱼类生物多样性与渔业生产力等重要生态系统服务密切相关。因此，至关重要的是要了解这些环境变化可能如何改变河口鱼类的生物多样性，以及不断扩大的暖水物种可能如何重塑沿海渔业。该项目将支持一名博士后研究人员，并提供统计、数据合成和协作方面的创新培训。这项研究的目的是确定河口鱼类生物多样性多个组成部分(阿尔法、时间贝塔和空间贝塔多样性)的环境和人类驱动因素。该项目将利用从南得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来评估嵌套空间尺度(调查地点、海湾、生态区域和大陆)的生物多样性趋势。通过将生物多样性数据与环境和土地利用数据以及多尺度和分层模型相结合，将有可能确定生物多样性变化的热点、这种变化的重要预测因素以及对生物多样性有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，来评估暖水物种的增加是否正在推动主要范围边界的生物多样性变化。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.