Linking ontogenetic niche shifts and functional diversity: Consequences for community dynamics and biodiversity loss

随着个体的成长和发展，他们的形态和行为经常会发生重大变化。 这些变化反过来又经常改变个人与社区其他成员的互动。 因此，物种内的发育阶段在其生态作用方面可能存在很大差异，这些差异甚至可能超过物种之间的差异。 虽然最近的研究表明，这种个体发生的变化在生态中是普遍存在的自然群落中的植物和动物类群，他们往往被忽视的一般理论与生物多样性的生态系统的功能。 然而，我们预测自然和人为干扰如何改变自然生态系统的能力，关键取决于对物种内生态变化与群落和生态系统过程的结构和动态之间联系的机制的理解。 该项目将通过制定一个总体框架来解决这一差距，以预测跨物种和社区个体生态的发展变化，以及这些发展变化何时以及如何影响自然生态系统对环境干扰（如选择性捕捞）的反应。野外实验将独立操纵池塘生态系统中捕食性无脊椎动物复杂群落的发育阶段和物种多样性。这将提供新的见解如何个体发育功能多样性的影响物种损失的后果，群落结构和生态系统过程，如初级生产力。将通过将理论与一组实验相结合来测试个体发生变化对群落动态和稳定性的长期影响，这些实验操纵浮游生物群落沿着环境梯度的个体发生变化的程度。总之，这些研究将允许一个新的详细了解物种内的发展变化如何扩大到影响整个社区和他们的功能，并将推进我们的概念理解是否和什么细节需要包括在一个一般的预测框架生态系统功能。鉴于人类对自然种群的影响通常是高度选择性的，并影响物种内的特定发育阶段（例如渔业中的大小选择性捕捞），本项目的结果可用于指导保护和捕捞战略的制定，以确保重要的生态系统功能在未来不会丧失。 该项目还将为本科生和研究生提供培训机会，包括在科学领域代表性不足的群体的成员，并将支持博士后学者的高级培训和指导。

As individuals grow and develop, they often experience substantial changes in their morphology and behavior. These changes, in turn, frequently alter the interactions of individuals with other members of the community. As a consequence, developmental stages within species can differ substantially in their ecological role and these differences can even exceed differences among species. Although recent research demonstrates that such ontogenetic shifts in the ecology are ubiquitous in natural communities in both plants and animal taxa, they are often ignored in general theory relating biodiversity to the functioning of ecosystems. Yet, our ability to predict how natural and anthropogenic disturbances alter natural ecosystems depends critically on a understanding of the mechanisms that link ecological variation within species to the structure and dynamics of communities and ecosystem processes. This project will address that gap by developing a general framework to predict developmental changes in the ecology of individuals across species and communities, and when and how these developmental changes influence the response of natural ecosystems to environmental disturbances such as selective harvesting. Field experiments will independently manipulate developmental stage and species diversity in a complex community of predatory invertebrates in pond ecosystems. This will provide novel insights into how ontogenetic functional diversity influences the consequences of species loss for community structure and ecosystem processes such as primary productivity. The long-term consequences of ontogenetic shifts for the dynamics and stability of communities will be tested by integrating theory with a set of experiments that manipulate the degree of ontogenetic shift in a plankton community along environmental gradients. Together, these studies will permit a new detailed understanding of how developmental changes within species scale up to affect entire communities and their functioning, and will advance our conceptual understanding of whether and what details need to be included in a general predictive framework for ecosystem functioning.The results of this project will also have important practical applications. Given that human impacts on natural populations are typically highly selective and affect specific developmental stages within species (e.g. size selective harvesting in fisheries) results from this project can be used to guide the development of conservation and harvest strategies to assure that vital ecosystem functions are not lost in the future. This project will also provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, including members of groups underrepresented in the sciences, and will support the advanced training and mentoring of a postdoctoral scholar.