IntBIO COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Integrating trait diversity across hierarchical scales to predict biological resilience in an era of extreme environmental change

IntBIO 合作研究：整合不同层次尺度的性状多样性，以预测极端环境变化时代的生物恢复力

• 批准号: 2128302
• 负责人: Kevin Wilcox
• 金额: $ 87.81万
• 依托单位: University of Wyoming
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-10-01 至 2026-09-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2128302&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: IntBIO; COLLABORATIVE; RESEARCH; Integrating; trait

Extreme climate events, such as drought or wildfire, may occur in high frequency and/or in tandem. These extremes are likely to occur more frequently over the coming decades and will likely have more severe effects on natural and human landscapes than when extreme events occur alone. Many parts of southern Africa suffered the effects of compound extremes in 2015 and 2016 when drought and heavy wildlife use caused substantial declines in vegetative cover and mass wildlife mortality in national parks. Many areas are yet to fully recover. Ecosystem recovery after compound extremes is critical for maintaining important services that landscapes provide, such as wildlife habitat, food production, and carbon storage. The mechanisms behind recovery after extreme events are not well understood, although there is mounting evidence that the diversity of organisms (i.e., biodiversity) within ecosystems may be key. This award will experimentally impose compound extremes in a South African savanna and incorporate measured outcomes into computer models to understand how diversity of plant life controls ecosystem recovery after compound extremes. The information and tools created by this project will be important for land managers and policy makers to maximize the recovery potential of public and private lands through the promotion of biodiversity. Additionally, this project will provide important training and education opportunities for a diverse assemblage of people (local South African stakeholders, high school, undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars), and will prioritize advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the sciences.Currently, the importance of biodiversity for ecosystem recovery (i.e., resilience) is recognized at the community level, but the mechanisms underlying species diversity that can extend these concepts to other spatial and hierarchical scales are not well understood. Organismal traits provide a useful framework for understanding these mechanisms because the coordination of physiological, morphological, and anatomical characteristics determine the response of individuals to their environment; this facilitates scaling from organisms to populations, communities, and ecosystems using first principles. This study will first extend biodiversity-resilience ideas beyond simple species diversity by using methods to examine diversity of plant traits (e.g., functional dispersion). Second, it will scale biodiversity-resilience relationships from individual organisms, through populations and communities, to entire ecosystems. To these ends, this project will experimentally impose extreme drought, extreme grazing, and extreme fire, singly and in combination, in a South African savanna and determine (1) diversity of functional traits before, during, and after treatments to link with (2) responses of individuals, populations, communities, and the ecosystem during and after treatments. Empirical data will then be used to parameterize and benchmark a mechanistic demographic vegetation model to expand the inference of these effects to longer time frames and a wider range of biodiversity scenarios. The three overarching questions this project will address are: (1) How does diversity at different hierarchical scales control resilience of biological function after perturbations? (2) How do perturbations affect biodiversity at multiple hierarchical scales? (3) How does diversity and resilience change with frequency and compound perturbations?This project is jointly funded by Emerging Frontiers in the Directorate for Biological Sciences and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).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.

干旱或野火等极端气候事件可能会频繁发生和/或同时发生。这些极端事件在未来几十年可能会更频繁地发生，并且可能比极端事件单独发生时对自然和人文景观产生更严重的影响。 2015年和2016年，南部非洲许多地区遭受了复合极端事件的影响，干旱和野生动物的大量使用导致国家公园的植被覆盖率大幅下降和野生动物大量死亡。许多地区尚未完全恢复。复合极端事件后的生态系统恢复对于维持景观提供的重要服务至关重要，例如野生动物栖息地、粮食生产和碳储存。尽管有越来越多的证据表明生态系统内生物多样性（即生物多样性）可能是关键，但极端事件后恢复背后的机制尚不清楚。该奖项将通过实验在南非稀树草原上施加复合极端情况，并将测量结果纳入计算机模型中，以了解植物生命的多样性如何控制复合极端情况后的生态系统恢复。该项目创建的信息和工具对于土地管理者和政策制定者通过促进生物多样性最大限度地发挥公共和私人土地的恢复潜力非常重要。此外，该项目将为不同人群（南非当地利益相关者、高中、本科生和研究生以及博士后学者）提供重要的培训和教育机会，并将优先考虑科学领域的多样性、公平性和包容性。目前，生物多样性对于生态系统恢复（即复原力）的重要性在社区层面得到了认识，但机制尚不明确。 可以将这些概念扩展到其他空间和层次尺度的潜在物种多样性尚不清楚。生物体特征为理解这些机制提供了一个有用的框架，因为生理、形态和解剖特征的协调决定了个体对其环境的反应。这有利于利用第一原则从生物体扩展到种群、社区和生态系统。这项研究将首先通过使用检查植物性状多样性（例如功能分散）的方法，将生物多样性恢复力的想法扩展到简单的物种多样性之外。其次，它将扩大生物多样性与复原力的关系，从个体生物体，到种群和社区，再到整个生态系统。为此，该项目将在南非稀树草原上试验性地单独或组合地施加极端干旱、极端放牧和极端火灾，并确定（1）处理之前、期间和之后功能特征的多样性，以与（2）处理期间和之后个人、群体、社区和生态系统的反应联系起来。然后，经验数据将用于对机械人口统计植被模型进行参数化和基准测试，以将这些影响的推论扩展到更长的时间范围和更广泛的生物多样性情景。该项目将解决的三个首要问题是：（1）不同层次尺度的多样性如何控制扰动后生物功能的恢复力？ (2) 扰动如何在多个层次尺度上影响生物多样性？ (3)多样性和复原力如何随频率和复合扰动而变化？该项目由生物科学理事会新兴前沿和刺激竞争性研究既定计划（EPSCoR）共同资助。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。