Exploring interactions among climatic stressors and adaptive freshwater metacommunities

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The ecological surprises of global change attest to the lack of a conceptual approach to the study of cumulative impacts by multiple novel and rapid environmental changes (i.e. stressors). Interactions among stressors and species are at the core of these unexpected events as they result in indirect effects that cannot be easily predicted based on knowledge of single direct effects. However, mechanistic understanding of the mediating effects of abiotic and biotic (e.g., competition, predation) interactions, species dispersal, and adaptation on stressed communities remains very limited. Integration of the evolving niche and metacommunity concepts provides a tool for discovering eco-evolutionary dynamics involving multiple stressors, such as extreme climatic events (e.g., drought and heat waves). Functional species traits must also be considered in such an approach to enable forecasting of the net impacts of climatic stressors on ecosystem function and their services. The premise of my proposal is that exploring pond metacommunities along altitudinal and latitudinal gradients can reveal how global warming affects biodiversity and functional performance. Several discoveries by my group of young scientists are the basis for this proposed research, which will build on our empirical strength to investigate the net effects of multiple stressors on aquatic ecosystems. We will address these four research objectives over the next five years: