Predicting community stability from species’ contribution to resistance, resilience and recovery

生态稳定性是预测环境变化后果的关键，因为它包括响应方面，如承受、吸收或从脉冲和压力干扰以及波动中恢复的能力。生态稳定性科学评估的最新进展主要来自：（1）承认稳定性的多维性质;（2）区分生态系统紧急功能特性的稳定性和群落组成的稳定性;（3）认识到空间动态对理解局部稳定性的重要性。尽管取得了这些进展，但稳定性的评估（及其在生态学和环境科学中的应用）仍然受到我们无法从物种特异性表现和物种性状预测群落稳定性的阻碍。了解物种对稳定的贡献是这项建议的主要目标。我们将完善和测试指标，捕捉物种对不断变化的环境的反应，并使用这些指标来预测稳定性从单一物种的性能和比较预测观察到的稳定性在社区层面。这项工作分为四个工作包，结合模拟和数据分析（WP 1）与三个实验工作包的复杂性不断增加（WP 2 -4）。WP 1中的元分析使用最近开发的稳定性分解方法来确定有助于不同类型生态系统和生物体的稳定性和脆弱性的物种。在实验中，海洋浮游生物群落将受到不同的温度趋势和波动的影响。这些实验将从自下而上的方法开始，将具有已知响应的物种组合成物种对和低多样性组合，将预期的稳定性与观察到的稳定性（WP 2）进行比较。在WP 3中，我们将测试稳定性方面的可预测性，如阻力，弹性，恢复和时间稳定性在不同连接水平下的变化。最后，我们将使用一个室内围隔设施，以测试是否有相同的性状影响浮游植物群落的稳定性，在没有或存在一个通才浮游动物消费者。

Ecological stability is key to predict consequences of environmental change, as it encompasses response aspects such as the ability to withstand, absorb or recover from pulse and press disturbances as well as fluctuations. Major recent advances in the scientific assessment of ecological stability resulted from i) acknowledging the multidimensional nature of stability, ii) differentiating between the stability of emergent functional properties of the ecosystem and the stability of community composition, and iii) realizing the importance of spatial dynamics for understanding local stability properties. Despite these advances, the assessment of stability (and its use in ecology and environmental sciences) is still hampered by our inability to predict community stability from species-specific performances and species traits. Understanding species’ contributions to stability is the key objective of this proposal. We will refine and test metrics that capture species responses to changing environments and use these metrics to predict stability from single species performance and compare predicted to observed stability at the community level. The work is divided into four work packages, combining simulations & data analysis (WP 1) with three experimental work packages of increasing complexity (WP2-4). The meta-analysis in WP 1 uses recently developed stability decomposition methods to identify species contributing to stability and vulnerability across different types of ecosystems and organisms. For the experiments, marine plankton communities will be subjected to different trends and fluctuations in temperature. These experiments will start from a bottom-up approach combining species with known responses into species pairs and low diversity assemblages, comparing expected to observed stability (WP 2). In WP 3, we will test how the predictability of stability aspects such as resistance, resilience, recovery and temporal stability changes under different levels of connectivity using a metacommunity setup. Finally, we will use an indoor mesocosm facility to test whether the same traits affect phytoplankton community stability in the absence or presence of a generalist zooplankton consumer.