Scaling from organismal traits to populations and species range limits

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Travel to any location around the world, and you are bound to encounter new species, some familiar and some unlike anything you have seen before. Alternatively, open any field guide-to the birds, reptiles, trees, mushrooms or any other group-and you will find species' range maps, showing where each species may, or may not, be found. Both cases reveal one of ecology's most fundamental truths: all species have geographical limits and no species (not even our own) can persist everywhere, in all environments. But why not? What stops species from spreading outwards, to all environments? In other words, what sets limits on species' geographical distributions? Answering this question has never been more important; in response to rapid environmental change, many species' ranges are changing, either expanding or contracting. These range shifts can have considerable conservation, economic, and health implications through effects on at-risk species, the spread of invasives, and even zoonotic disease risk. Ultimately, range limits arise from interactions between individual organisms and their local abiotic and biotic environments; understanding how these organism-scale interactions generate range limits may hold the key to predicting their broad-scale dynamics. This project will bring together laboratory experiments, field studies, remote-sensing and big-data modelling to 1) test how climate and land use change are altering the fine-scale environments experienced by organisms, 2) test how species' physiological tolerances, trophic interactions and dispersal dynamics scale to constrain population size and species range margins, and 3) establish a long-term monitoring program to predict range dynamics in changing environments. Answering these questions will shed new light on the mechanisms underlying species' range limits and improve our ability to predict species' geographical fates as rapid environmental change reshuffles global biodiversity.