Toward a general framework for how environmental change affects herbivore-plant interactions

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Our society relies on goods and services produced by ecological systems. These include carbon sequestration,plant growth and seafood production. One major challenge facing scientists today is to understand why thesefunctions vary from place to place, and to anticipate how they might change in the future with climate change.Though ecological systems are highly complex, and this complexity is important to understand, in my researchI take the approach that we can understand a substantial amount of ecological change by focusing on verysimple, general effects of environmental temperature on the rates and outcomes of ecological processes.Environmental temperature affects fundamental biological processes in general ways. We can use this generaleffect of temperature to project how complex ecological systems respond to environmental variation intemperature, as occurs with season, latitude or global climate change. Evidence suggests that warmingstrengthens the impacts of herbivores on plants, whether the herbivores are insects or fish or zooplankton, and Ipropose to use experiments and theory to test the effects of small increases in temperature on the effect ofherbivores on plants. My research group will test the effects of warming on planktonic food webs, and usemodels to apply our experimental findings to large-scale natural systems that support fishproduction, carbon sequestration and biodiversity in the world's oceans.My group's research will produce evidence and models that will directly inform projections of how climatechange affects ecosystems. This kind of information represents a frontier of science, and was lacking in themost recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative body of climatechange science and impacts. Our work will therefore contribute to a broader understanding of ecologicalsystems now and in the future.