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

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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.