The Effects Of Parasites On Food Web Structure And Dynamics: New Ways To Improve Accuracy And Ecological Realism

寄生虫对食物网结构和动态的影响：提高准确性和生态现实性的新方法

• 批准号: 2728060
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Edinburgh Napier University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2728060
• 关键词: Effects; Parasites; Food; Web; Structure

The proposed project fits strongly within the 'Biodiversity and ecosystem function' and 'Challenged ecosystems' themes.Food webs are fundamental to our understanding of ecological communities, to identifying ecological relationships and to exploring how species loss and other stressors affect ecosystem resilience and persistence, as they describe the scaffolding that supports ecosystems. The importance of food web indicators is reflected in their utilization as descriptor to achieve Good Environmental Status for marine environments under the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive(MSFD).This PhD project addresses a major and persistent gap in our knowledge of ecological communities, as half of the world's species -parasites -are routinely ignored in food web analyses for practical and conceptual reasons. Parasites have only even been considered in the food web literature for the past 20 years. Given the ubiquity of parasite links they remain very under-represented. A simple search on Web of Science for 'food web' yields 35.965 publications, adding 'parasite' to the search reduces publication numbers to only 799.By addressing this gap of knowledge, the PhD student has a great opportunity here to influence the field of food web and ecosystem research, both in a conceptual (inclusion of parasites) and practical way (planned pilot study on possible eDNA approaches). Food webs are integrative concepts that cross-arbitrary boundaries between species and ecosystems. Climate change as well as other anthropogenic stressors have been shown to cause effects such as species range expansion/movement and can only be understood and predicted if ecosystems can be described quantitatively in their full complexity. An established novel method of including parasites in food webs and proof of its effectiveness will provide a translational concept approach that could be applied to any ecosystem present between catchment and coast.

这项拟议的项目与“生物多样性和生态系统功能”和“挑战的生态系统”主题非常契合。食物网对于我们理解生态群落、确定生态关系以及探索物种丧失和其他压力因素如何影响生态系统的弹性和持久性是至关重要的，因为它们描述了支撑生态系统的脚手架。根据欧盟海洋战略框架指令(MSFD)，食物网指标的重要性体现在它们被用作描述符，以实现良好的海洋环境状况。这个博士项目解决了我们对生态群落知识的一个重大和持久的缺口，因为由于实际和概念上的原因，世界上一半的物种-寄生虫-在食物网分析中经常被忽视。寄生虫甚至只是在过去20年里才在食物网络文献中被考虑过。鉴于寄生虫的联系无处不在，它们的代表性仍然很低。在科学网上简单地搜索“食物网”会得到35.965种出版物，在搜索中加上“寄生虫”会使发表的论文数量减少到只有799种。通过解决这一知识缺口，博士生有很好的机会在这里影响食物网和生态系统研究领域，无论是在概念上(包括寄生虫)，还是在实践中(计划中的关于可能的EDNA方法的初步研究)。食物网是跨越物种和生态系统之间任意边界的综合概念。气候变化以及其他人为应激因素已被证明会造成物种范围扩大/迁移等影响，只有在能够对生态系统的全部复杂性进行定量描述的情况下，才能了解和预测这些影响。一种已建立的将寄生虫包括在食物网中的新方法及其有效性的证明将提供一种可应用于集水区和海岸之间的任何生态系统的转换概念方法。