Effects of local and regional processes on freshwater metacommunities in a changing world

我们对生态系统理解的一个主要差距是由于未能认识和有效描述发生在不同空间尺度上的过程之间的相互作用。面对一个日益破碎和变暖的世界，这些跨尺度的相互作用有可能影响人口和社区的生态。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，但对于这些变化将如何影响种群和物种的生存能力，我们仍然缺乏扎实的理解。预测这些环境变化对种群过程的影响，并根据这些情景制定有效的保护措施，需要了解跨空间和时间尺度（从单个池塘到池塘的大陆分布，从每天发生的相互作用到几十年的种群变化）的过程将如何相互作用。我研究的长期目标是了解在区域物种池中构建和维持多样性的力量，并确定这些过程对塑造物种在栖息地和景观中的分布的贡献。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等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省池塘多样性模式的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。我们在生态科学中面临的一个主要差距是我们对分散的理解，即生物体在栖息地之间的运动。我实验室的研究将通过研究分散的原因和后果来阐明这一过程，从个体移动的原因到环境中的物种如何决定彼此的移动速度。我们还将研究气候变化引起的环境变暖如何影响淡水物种。这项工作将包括评估哪些物种最容易受到气候变化的影响，并检查不同季节的气候变化，包括夏季变暖和冬季变短，将影响这些群落中的物种。我的研究小组还将探索寄生虫、捕食者和作为这些寄生虫宿主的猎物物种之间的相互作用。这将使我们更好地了解寄生虫在这些系统中的影响。这些项目有可能改变我们对生态群落结构的理解，以及气候变暖导致栖息地减少对人口和社区的影响。我们的目标是在快速变化的世界中为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 populations and species 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 wide spatial and temporal scales (from a single pond to the continental distribution of ponds, and from interactions happening daily to population changes across decades) will interact. 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 as well as 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 of ponds in Ontario. One major gap we face in ecological science is in our understanding of dispersal, the movement of organisms between habitats. Research in my lab will shed light on this process by examining the causes and consequences of dispersal, from why an individual moves to how the species within an environment determine each other's movement rates. We will also examine how environmental warming caused by climate change affects freshwater species. This work will include assessing which species are most vulnerable to climate change and examining climatic changes across seasons including warmer summers and shorter winters will affect species in these communities. My research group will also explore interactions among parasites, predators, and prey species which are hosts to these parasites. This will allow us to better understand the effects of parasites in these systems. These projects have the potential to transform our understanding of how ecological communities are structured and how a warming climate with fewer accessible habitats will affect populations and communities. Our goal is build a new predictive framework for conservation planning in a rapidly changing world.