Effects of cross-scale interactions on community structure

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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.