Predicting climate and land use change impacts on pollinators across landscapes to continents

预测气候和土地利用变化对各大洲授粉媒介的影响

• 批准号: RGPIN-2017-06008
• 负责人: Kerr, Jeremy
• 金额: $ 4.23万
• 依托单位: University of Ottawa
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2020-01-01 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=711517
• 关键词: Predicting; climate; land; use; change

Human activities have created pervasive environmental changes that have accelerated extinction rates globally and in Canada. The critical factors that contribute to the loss of species - and that may degrade the services that ecosystems provide - include many well-known threats, such as habitat losses, and emerging threats, like climate change. The impacts of such global changes are widespread but enormous gaps in our understanding limit current capacities to predict future biodiversity changes. This research program seeks, as its long term objective, to understand the processes that contribute to spatial and temporal variation in species diversity. Our recent discoveries show that some of the most important pollinator groups - the bumblebees - have shown massive range losses over recent decades relative to historical baseline conditions, effects that may be a consequence of climate changes. The unusual susceptibility of these species to climate change relates to niche conservatism in their relative tolerance of warming in the hottest areas they historically occupied. This work revealed unexpected and general trends, but also showed that there is very substantial variation among species in their ranges through time. What traits might determine why some species, whether bumblebees or butterflies, succeed despite massive environmental changes, while other species decline precipitously? This proposal seeks to identify key traits that may help answer this question and to test, for the first time, the relative impacts of land use changes versus climate changes on the distributions of bumblebee species across North America and Europe. The latter project includes international collaboration that will offer particularly distinct training opportunities. Bringing together models that account for the effects of individual species' characteristics on range shifts with other models that measure how traits vary within and among species assemblages across spatial scales forms the basis of a third major project in this proposal. We will focus on butterflies for this project and include extensive field work in Ontario and Quebec. This proposal is intended to move the research program closer to its long term objective by showing how variation in critical traits, like dispersal rates, among species can affect how communities are structured from local habitats to regions. The results of this work, as with our recent discoveries, will be used to inform policy processes in Canada and internationally.

人类活动造成了普遍的环境变化，加速了全球和加拿大的物种灭绝速度。造成物种丧失的关键因素——并可能降低生态系统提供的服务——包括许多众所周知的威胁，如栖息地丧失，以及新出现的威胁，如气候变化。这种全球变化的影响是广泛的，但我们在认识上的巨大差距限制了目前预测未来生物多样性变化的能力。该研究项目的长期目标是了解导致物种多样性时空变化的过程。我们最近的发现表明，一些最重要的传粉者群体——大黄蜂——在最近几十年里，相对于历史基线条件，出现了大规模的范围损失，这可能是气候变化的后果。这些物种对气候变化的异常敏感性与它们在历史上占据的最热地区相对耐受变暖的生态位保守性有关。这项工作揭示了意想不到的普遍趋势，但也表明，随着时间的推移，物种之间的分布范围有很大的变化。哪些特征可能决定了为什么一些物种，无论是大黄蜂还是蝴蝶，在巨大的环境变化中仍然成功，而其他物种却急剧下降？该提案旨在确定可能有助于回答这个问题的关键特征，并首次测试土地利用变化与气候变化对北美和欧洲大黄蜂物种分布的相对影响。后一个项目包括国际合作，将提供特别独特的培训机会。将解释单个物种特征对范围变化的影响的模型与测量跨空间尺度物种组合内部和之间特征变化的其他模型结合起来，构成了本提案中第三个主要项目的基础。在这个项目中，我们将把重点放在蝴蝶上，并在安大略省和魁北克省进行广泛的实地工作。该提案旨在通过展示物种之间的关键特征（如扩散率）的变化如何影响从当地栖息地到区域的群落结构，使研究项目更接近其长期目标。这项工作的结果，与我们最近的发现一样，将用于加拿大和国际上的政策制定过程。