CAREER: How Temporal Fluctuations Alter Indirect Interactions in Duckweed-based Communities and its Integration with a Student Report Exchange

食物网反映了物种之间的相互作用以及它们所吃的资源，通常是其他物种。食物网中的直接相互作用，即消费者与猎物之间的相互作用，在决定群落中物种的动态方面起着关键作用。间接的相互作用是通过中间物种产生的影响，可能不会立即显现出来，但可能与直接相互作用一样重要。气候模型预测，由于强风暴事件和干旱频率增加等原因，许多地区的环境变异性可能会增加。将通过开发和测试食物网模型，研究环境变异性增加对食物网间接相互作用重要性的影响。食物网理论的实验测试将使用浮萍为基础的社区进行。浮萍是一种漂浮的水生植物，群落成员包括吃浮萍的昆虫和这些昆虫的捕食者。 温度变化会造成环境波动。精炼一般理论通过使用的浮萍社区将提供更好的理解如何环境波动可能会改变其他系统的利益，不能那么容易manipulated.The更广泛的影响，这项研究将包括一个分布式的实验设计，在不同的小学教室中，每个教室将是一个环境复制的浮萍为基础的研究项目。此外，学生设计的小学和大学的浮萍项目将通过互联网数据库进行交流，以扩大学生参与同行交流和基于调查的科学学习方法。

Food webs reflect the interactions among species and the resources that they are eating, typically other species. Direct interactions in food webs, those between a consumer and its prey, play key roles in determining the dynamics of species in a community. Indirect interactions, resulting from impacts through intermediary species, may not be immediately apparent but may be as important as direct interactions. Climate models predict that environmental variability may increase in many areas due to, for example, a greater frequency of intense storm events and droughts. The impact of increased environmental variability on the importance of indirect interactions in food webs will be studied by developing and testing food web models. Experimental tests of food web theory will be conducted using a duckweed-based community. Duckweeds are small, floating, aquatic plants, and community members include insects that eat duckweed and predators of those insects. Environmental fluctuations will be created by varying temperatures. Refining general theory through the use of the duckweed communities will provide enhanced understanding of how environmental fluctuations might alter other systems of interest which cannot be so easily manipulated.The broader impacts of this study will include a distributed experimental design among diverse elementary school classrooms in which each classroom will be an environmental replicate in a duckweed-based research project. In addition, student-designed duckweed projects at the elementary level and at the college level will be exchanged via an internet database to expand students' participation in a peer-exchange, inquiry-based approach to learning the science.