Bioenergetic approaches for understanding and forecasting ecological and epidemiological impacts of climate change

气候变化、土地利用变化和其他大规模干扰正在加速改变全球生态系统。需要能够概述未来影响的范围、时间和方式的生态预测模型，以便能够采取主动管理战略，例如在保护濒危物种和控制疾病方面。然而，与经常使用机制模型来预测气候变化的气候科学不同，生态学还没有提供一个全面的框架来预测生态系统对这些变化的反应。该提案整合了生理学、生态学和流行病学原理，开发、测试和应用机制模型，以了解和预测气候变化对保护和公共/野生动物健康两个关键领域的影响。

Climate change, land use change, and other large-scale disturbances are altering ecosystems globally at an accelerating rate. Ecological forecast models that can outline the scope, timeline and manner of future impacts are needed to allow for proactive management strategies, for example, in the conservation of endangered species and the control of diseases. However, unlike the climate sciences, where mechanistic models are routinely used to predict climate changes, ecology does not yet offer a comprehensive framework for predicting ecosystem response to these changes. This proposal integrates physiological, ecological and epidemiological principles to develop, test, and apply mechanistic models for understanding and forecasting climate change impacts in two key areas of conservation and public/wildlife health. First, we develop climate change impact models for polar bears and the Arctic marine food web. By focusing on energy as the common currency linking ecosystem processes, these models explicitly account for the mechanisms by which climate change disrupts the system, from changes in marine productivity to the links between sea ice loss, polar bear food stress, and polar bear population declines. The models will provide an unprecedented understanding of the dynamic processes shaping this food web, and will ultimately be used to develop risk assessments for polar bear populations worldwide. In particular, our research will provide the tools and analyses to update the latest Canadian status assessment of polar bears, which did not account for climate change impacts and thus resulted in overly optimistic assessments and likely unsustainable management strategies. Second, also using a bioenergetic approach, we develop a mechanistic framework for understanding and forecasting climate change impacts on parasitic diseases, including, for example, changes to the geographic ranges of parasites and the health consequences for wildlife, livestock, and human hosts. By establishing and leveraging systematic patterns on the temperature-sensitivity of parasites, the approach will allow for disease forecasts and proactive disease prevention programs worldwide, even for poorly studied parasite species. As one example, we will apply our framework to understand the role of climate change in recent parasite range expansions in the Canadian Arctic and evaluate the risk of future disease spread and health consequences for caribou and muskoxen, thus also contributing to the conservation of these species and the food security of Northerners who depend on healthy populations. In the long-term, the generality of the bioenergetic approach will allow my group to apply the concepts of this proposal to other species and diverse global change related conservation and public health issues, such as the ecological and epidemiological consequences of land use change, pollution, and invasive species.