U.S.-U.K.-Japan Collaboration: The Relationship Between Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function

9725937莱文对该项目的支持将使美国研究人员能够与日本京都大学生态研究中心和英国帝国理工学院人口生物学中心的研究人员和设施合作，并从中受益。环境变异性和竞争性排斥对维持群落某一功能所需物种数量的影响将通过数学方法来确定。然后，这些关系将在一系列实验中进行测试，在这些实验中，物种数量和环境受到操纵。美国团队将主要负责理论上的多样性-功能关系的推导，并将与英国团队合作，进行物种数量、降雨量和草食动物受到操纵的野外实验。日本团队将在遭受不同程度捕食或寄生的群落上进行生长室实验。目前对生态多样性-功能关系的许多分析忽略了个体物种在不同环境条件下表现的差异，也忽略了竞争排斥对群落功能多年衡量标准的影响。该项目将结合美国、日本和英国研究小组的专业知识和设施，调查维持基本生态系统服务和功能所需的生物多样性保护水平。***

9725937 Levin Support for this project will enable American researchers to collaborate with and benefit from researchers and facilities at the Center for Ecological Research at Kyoto University in Japan and the Center for Population Biology at the Imperial College in the United Kingdom. The impact of environmental variability and competitive exclusion on the number of species required to maintain a certain level of function in communities will be determined mathematically. Those relationships will then be tested in a series of experiments in which species numbers and environments are manipulated. The U.S. team will be primarily responsible for the derivation of the theoretical diversity-function relationships, and will, in cooperation with the U.K. team, conduct field experiments in which species number, precipitation, and herbivory are manipulated. The Japanese team will perform growth-chamber experiments on communities subjected to different levels of predation or parasitism. Many current analyses of ecological diversity-function relationships ignore variations in the performance of individual species with varying environmental conditions, and ignore the impacts of competitive exclusion on multi- year measures of community function. This project will combine the expertise and facilities of American, Japanese and British research groups to investigate the level of biodiversity preservation required to maintain essential ecosystem services and functions. ***