Structure and functioning of ecological entities across levels of biological organization

环境变化影响着生物组织和时空尺度多层次的生态结构和功能。物理环境影响个体生物的特性，例如它们的生长和代谢率，以及它们如何分散，喂养和与其他个体相互作用。由于这些个体属性影响更高层次的组织，环境对个体的影响应该向上传播，并在种群、社区和生态系统层面表现为功能差异。因此，理解和预测物理环境的生态响应，理想情况下需要一个多层次的方法，结合跨组织层次和时空尺度进行的观察和实验。 最近在淡水系统中的研究表明，生态系统和食物网结构的变化与个体水平的特征（如体型和觅食模式）有着可预见的联系。这些特征与不同营养级的消费者的运动尺度有关，从而与消费者以广泛的资源为食并在空间上耦合不同栖息地的潜力有关。此外，理论和观察表明，消费者对栖息地之间的资源变化的反应可能会改变可预见的沿着自然环境梯度，这些差异消费者的反应可能会产生深远的影响，更高层次的过程，如栖息地耦合和营养补贴。 拟议的研究的主要目标是研究的过程中驱动的鱼类物种的空间分布在两个相邻的大生境，一个大的河流湖泊及其边缘洪泛区。将特别强调理解依赖于上下文的反应，即，功能特征和环境梯度对关键生态过程的相互影响，以及它们对从个人到生态系统的组织层面的结构和功能的影响。 识别将个人属性与更高层次的组织属性联系起来的模式，可以深入了解适用于特定研究系统之外的一般过程和机制。这些知识有助于了解当前人类的影响，并预测和管理未来的变化，例如由于土地利用和气候模式的变化而引起的水浊度和温度趋势的增加。这也是迈向基于理论的生物监测的一个步骤，其中纳入了关于营养网内部相互作用的科学知识，以捕捉功能关系及其在维持生态系统功能方面的作用。例如，管理人员可能感兴趣的是，渔业通常针对的大型捕食者的移动是否对维持洪泛区的连通性和大生境之间的生产补贴至关重要。

Environmental variation influences ecological structure and function across multiple levels of biological organization and spatio-temporal scales. The physical environment affects properties of individual organisms, such as their growth and metabolic rates, and how they disperse, feed, and interact with other individuals. Because those individual properties influence higher levels of organization, environmental effects on individuals should propagate upwards and be expressed as functional differences at the population, community, and ecosystem levels. Accordingly, understanding and predicting ecological responses to the physical environment ideally requires a multilevel approach that combines observations and experiments conducted across organizational levels and spatio-temporal scales. Recent work in freshwater systems has shown that changes in ecosystem and food web structure are predictably linked to individual-level traits, such as body size and foraging mode. These traits are related to the movement scales of consumers at different trophic levels, and thus to the consumers' potential to feed on a broad range of resources and spatially couple distinct habitats. Furthermore, theory and observations show that consumer responses to resource variation between habitats may change predictably along natural environmental gradients, and that these differential consumer responses may have a profound influence on higher-level processes such as habitat coupling and trophic subsidies. The main goal of the proposed research is to examine the processes driving the spatial distribution of fish species in two adjacent macrohabitats, a large fluvial lake and its fringing floodplain. Special emphasis will be placed on understanding context-dependent responses, i.e., the interactive effects of functional traits and environmental gradients on key ecological processes, and their implications for structure and function across organizational levels, from the individual to the ecosystem. Identifying patterns that connect properties of individuals to those of higher levels of organization can yield insights into general processes and mechanisms that are applicable beyond a specific study system. This knowledge is useful to understand current human impacts and predict and manage future changes such as increasing water turbidity and temperature trends arising from changing land use and climate patterns. It also represents a step towards theory-based biomonitoring that incorporates scientific knowledge on interactions within trophic webs to capture functional relationships and their role in sustaining ecosystem function. For example, managers may be interested in whether the movements of large predators typically targeted by fisheries are critical to sustaining floodplain connectivity and production subsidies between macrohabitats.