Changing species interactions along environmental gradients

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One of the greatest challenges facing the field of ecology today is to connect advances in physiology and fundamental ecology, towards improving predictions about ecological responses to climate change. One particularly complex and pervasive issue is our understanding of how interactions between species - such as competition and predation - change as a function of the environment. In this proposal, I plan to take a two-tiered approach to addressing this challenge, focusing on competition.First, using experimental microcosms, my research group will test theoretical predictions about how exploitative competition changes as a function of increased temperature and changes in aquatic CO2. We will base our predictions on metabolic scaling theory, and use controlled experiments to ascertain the role of metabolic scaling rate and other traits, upon outcomes of competition. We will also test our predictive power by assessing competitive outcomes between pairs of species in different environments. This work will be highly impactful in the field of ecology, will be of keen interest to geographic ecologists working to understand how species interactions change across a species' range, and will be of wide general interest to researchers and managers working in systems where competitive outcomes are changing with climate.Second, we will use ecological synthesis to apply these results at a wider taxonomic and spatial scale. We will collate and synthesize published studies in which species' physiological traits associated with exploitative competition have been found to change as a function of temperature, to uncover the generality of these responses. We will also bring together regional studies of changes in species dominance as a function of temperature and CO2, and build a database of species traits with which to test a trait-based framework for understanding changes in species dominance in future ocean climates. This work will extend the impacts of our work to the global scale.This program is designed to directly address critical shortcomings in our ability to project biotic responses to environmental change, and pushes the field of ecology towards a deeper mechanistic understanding of the role of the environment upon species interactions. We focus on climate change - and plan to engage with Canadian managers, policy-makers, and NGOs - in order to magnify the impacts of these results towards climate change adaptation strategies in Canada. This work will transform how we think about community interactions and climate change, and mark Canada as a leader in developing ecologically-grounded projections of climate change responses.