Quantifying the Resilience and Functioning of Freshwater Ecosystems Across Spatial and Temporal Gradients of Environmental Stress

量化淡水生态系统在环境压力时空梯度下的恢复力和功能

• 批准号: 2788426
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Queen's University Belfast
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2788426
• 关键词: Quantifying; Resilience; Functioning; Freshwater; Ecosystems

How natural and semi-natural systems will adapt to extreme events as our climate changes remains a pressing question in ecology. Ecosystems are highly sensitive to multiple, and often interacting, environmental pressures, such as agricultural intensification and climate change, which vary in distribution and intensity across spatiotemporal scales, and with regional variations (e.g. geo-climate). This can result in impacts, which alters both the structural and functional properties of the ecosystems. Consequently, this places ecosystems under significant stress, reducing ecosystem services. The capacity of an ecosystem to deal with stress is finite, and consequently they are predicted to undergo regime shifts when the adaptive capacity of the system is exceeded, although recent studies demonstrate a lack of empirical evidence for such shifts (Hillebrand et al. 2020). This project will focus on the capacity of lotic systems to absorb, adapt and recover from episodic disturbances across a gradient of environmental stress and community resilience. The project is a CASE studentship in collaboration with the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) in Northern Ireland and will experimentally quantify and assess the relative merits of different measures of ecological resilience (Holling 1973) and multiple measures of ecological stability (Donohue et al. 2013). This project, therefore, offers the opportunity to evaluate the mechanisms that underpin variation in ecological stability and will attempt to quantify empirically species-specific contributions to multiple measures of stability including variability, resistance and recovery (engineering resilience). Emphasis will be placed on freshwater invertebrate and benthic biofilm community structure, with a focus on quantifying species interactions, and both functional (e.g. body mass, trophic level and trophic role) and structural properties (e.g. abundances and richness) to support a fundamental exploration of different stability concepts and their relevance in applied management.

随着我们的气候变化仍然是生态学的一个紧迫问题，自然和半自然系统将如何适应极端事件。生态系统对多重且经常相互作用的环境压力高度敏感，例如农业强化和气候变化，它们的分布和强度在时空尺度之间以及区域变化（例如地理气候）方面有所不同。这可能会导致影响，从而改变生态系统的结构和功能特性。因此，这使生态系统承受重大压力，从而减少了生态系统服务。生态系统应对压力的能力是有限的，因此，当超过系统的适应能力时，它们被预测会发生政权转移，尽管最近的研究表明缺乏这种转变的经验证据（Hillebrand等，2020年）。该项目将重点关注Lotic Systems吸收，适应和从环境压力和社区弹性梯度中的情节干扰中恢复的能力。该项目是与北爱尔兰的农业食品和生物科学研究所（AFBI）合作的案例学生，并将通过实验量化和评估不同生态弹性量度的相对优点（Holling 1973）和生态稳定性的多种测量方法（Donohue等人，2013年）。因此，该项目提供了评估生态稳定性差异的机制的机会，并将试图量化对多种稳定性测量的经验物种特定贡献，包括可变性，抗性和恢复（工程弹性）。重点将放在淡水无脊椎动物和底栖生物膜群落结构上，重点是量化物种相互作用，以及功能（例如体重，营养水平和营养作用）和结构特性（例如丰度和丰富性），以支持对不同稳定性概念和其相关性的基本探索。