MULTI-STRESS: Quantifying the impacts of multiple stressors in multiple dimensions to improve ecological forecasting

我们的世界以变化为特征，在很大程度上是由人类活动驱动的。这些活动--如自然资源的收获和温室气体的排放--给我们这个星球的生态系统带来了压力，通过人口数量的减少和物种的灭绝重塑了全球生物多样性。然而，对于这些有害活动(称为“应激源”)影响野生动物种群的机制，我们仍然知之甚少。全球大多数物种(约80%)同时面临不止一种压力因素(如捕鱼压力和气候变化)，这进一步加剧了这种理解的缺乏。在这种情况下，应激源可能以不可预测的方式相互作用，进一步加速生物多样性的下降。因此，如果不能更好地了解应激源如何相互作用影响野生动物种群，就不可能准确预测生物多样性在未来将如何变化，也不可能确定面临最高灭绝风险的物种。这个项目将以一种与以前尝试的根本不同的方式来解决我们知识中的这一差距。我们将使用两个脆弱的红色名录海鸟物种的特殊数据集作为模型系统，量化两个突出的应激源(气候变化和渔业压力)如何同时影响种群生态的多个方面，而不是只研究多个应激源对种群丰度的影响。我们将在一个单一的分析框架内探索应激源如何影响行为(个人觅食努力)、身体状况(身体状况，衡量个人整体健康的指标)、人口比率(例如，存活率、繁殖力)和人口趋势。这样做将使我们能够了解野生动物种群如何变化以应对日益增加的人类衍生压力，这种变化是否可以缓解多重应激源的负面影响，以及这些变化是否可以用来预测面临崩溃风险的种群。然后，我们将利用这些信息建立模型，通过明确纳入个体在面临越来越大的压力时改变行为、形态和人口比率的能力，来预测这些脆弱物种将如何应对未来的环境变化。该项目的成果有可能彻底改变我们对多种应激源如何影响种群生态的多个方面，以及这些影响如何加在一起才能推动生物多样性变化的理解。该项目产生的知识将帮助自然资源保护者制定更有效的战略来管理濒危物种，政策制定者将更可靠地判断资源开采的影响，公众将更深入地了解野生动物因人类活动而面临的挑战。它还将提供一个更广泛的研究界可以建立的平台，以促进我们对多种应激源对生物多样性影响的理解。

Our world is characterised by change, driven largely by human activities. These activities - such as the harvesting of natural resources and emission of greenhouse gases - put pressure on our planet's ecosystems, reshaping global biodiversity through declines in the abundance of populations, and the extinction of species. However, we still have limited understanding of the mechanisms by which these detrimental activities (termed "stressors") affect wildlife populations. This lack of understanding is further exacerbated by the fact that most species globally (~80%) are exposed to more than one stressor (e.g. fishing pressure and climate change) simultaneously. In such a scenario, stressors may interact in unpredictable ways, further accelerating biodiversity declines. Consequently, without a better understanding of how stressors interact to impact wildlife populations it is impossible to accurately forecast how biodiversity will change into the future, or identify species at the highest risk of extinction. This project will tackle this gap in our knowledge in a fundamentally different way to what has been attempted before. Rather than solely examining the impacts of multiple stressors on population abundances, we will use an exceptional dataset of two Vulnerable Red Listed seabird species as a model system to quantify how two prominent stressors (climate change and fishery pressure) impact multiple facets of a population's ecology simultaneously. We will explore how stressors impact behaviours (individual foraging effort), physical condition (body condition, a measure of an individual's overall health), demographic rates (e.g., survival, fecundity), and population trends over time within a single analytical framework. Doing so will allow us to understand how wildlife populations change to cope with increasing levels of anthropogenically derived stress, whether such changes mitigate the negative impacts of multiple stressors, and whether these changes can be used to predict populations that are at risk of collapse. We will then use this information to build models to forecast how these vulnerable species will cope with future environmental change by explicitly incorporating individual's ability to change behaviour, morphology, and demographic rates in the face of increasing stress. The outcomes of this project have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of how multiple stressors impact multiple facets of a population's ecology, and how these impacts can sum to drive biodiversity change. The knowledge generated by this project will help conservationists to develop more effective strategies to manage at-risk species, policy makers to more reliably judge the impacts of resource extraction, and the general public to gain a deeper appreciation of the challenges faced by wildlife due to human activities. It will also provide a platform on which the wider research community can build to advance our understanding of the impacts of multiple stressors on biodiversity.