Effects of cross-scale interactions on community structure

我们对生态系统的理解的一个主要差距来自于未能认识和有效地描述不同空间尺度上发生的过程之间的相互作用。这些跨尺度的相互作用有可能影响人口和社区的生态，面对一个日益分裂和变暖的世界。虽然我们有很好的模型来预测与气候变化相关的物理变化，但我们仍然缺乏对这些变化将如何影响物种和种群持续生存能力的坚实理解。预测这些环境变化对人口过程的影响，并根据这些情景开展有效的保护工作，需要了解跨空间和时间尺度的过程如何相互作用，以及这对景观和区域之间人口连通性的影响。我的研究的长期目标是了解的力量结构和保持多样性的区域物种库，并确定这些过程的贡献，塑造物种分布在栖息地和景观。这对于理解基本的生态过程以及从栖息地丧失到气候变化的人为变化将如何影响物种多样性的维持和分布至关重要。在接下来的五年里，我的研究小组将通过对安大略乔治亚湾岛屿上的水池和池塘的多样性结构和维持模式的过程进行研究，进一步实现这一长期目标。我们还将研究变暖的热环境如何影响扩散行为和形状景观连接。气候引起的体型变化有可能改变扩散行为，对种群和群落的结构和稳定性产生连锁效应，并可能通过改变其活动范围间接影响物种跟踪不断变化的环境条件的能力。这些项目有可能改变我们对气候变暖对人口和社区反应的影响的理解，并为气候变化背景下的保护规划建立一个新的预测框架。

A major gap in our understanding of ecological systems arises from a failure to recognize and effectively describe interactions among processes occurring at different spatial scales. These cross-scale interactions have the potential to affect the ecology of populations and communities in the face of an increasingly fragmented and warming world. While we have good models to predict the physical changes associated with climate change, we still lack a solid understanding of how these changes will affect the ability of species and populations to persist. Forecasting the effects of these environmental changes into population processes and developing effective conservation efforts based on these scenarios requires understanding how processes acting across spatial and temporal scales will interact and the consequences of this for population connectivity across landscapes and regions. The long-term objectives of my research are to understand the forces structuring and maintaining diversity within a regional species pool and to determine the contributions of these processes to shaping species distributions across habitats and landscapes. This is critical to understanding fundamental ecological processes and how anthropogenic changes, from habitat loss to climate change, will impact the maintenance of diversity and the distributions of species. Over the next five years my research group will further this long-term goal by conducting research on the processes structuring and maintaining patterns of diversity in pools and ponds on the islands of Ontario's Georgian Bay. We will also examine how warming thermal environments influence dispersal behavior and shape landscape connectivity. Climatically induced changes in body size have the potential to alter dispersal behavior with cascading effects on the structure and stability of populations and communities and may have indirect effects on the ability of species to track changing environmental conditions by shifting their ranges. These projects have the potential to transform our understanding of the effects of a warming climate on the responses of populations and communities and to build a new predictive framework for conservation planning in the context of climate change.