Collaborative Research: RAPID: Linking Population and Community Ecology in Restored Communities: Interactions Between Species Diversity and Genetic Diversity

了解景观如何在人类干扰后发生变化变得越来越重要。美国东北部和中西部的大部分地区以前被清除了原生植被，以支持农业，许多由此产生的农场随后被遗弃。这种修改和放弃的循环还在继续。该项目将利用密歇根州废弃农业用地的计划恢复来建立长期实验。这些实验可以被不同的研究人员使用，包括这个项目的研究人员，来了解当地社区和当地生物多样性是如何恢复的。这项研究将吸引积极参与蝴蝶、鸟类和植物监测项目的公民，以及当地K-12教师、本科生和研究生。该项目将加强研究科学家、密歇根州自然资源部和当地土地所有者之间的合作，他们将参与项目开发。这项研究的结果，包括实验地块，将作为未来社区和私人土地恢复工作的范例。物种多样性与群落和生态系统过程的关系是群落和生态系统生态学研究的重要内容。最近的研究包括遗传多样性及其通过遗传多样性和物种多样性之间的潜在反馈影响。通过该项目建立的大规模和长期实验操作将为了解物种和遗传多样性之间的关系以及生物多样性的这些方面如何影响种群，群落，生态系统和进化过程提供一个独特的试验场。迄今为止，大多数研究规模小，持续时间短。12块原农田将恢复为原草原，并将建立控制物种和遗传多样性的实验。这是将实验处理叠加到大规模修复上的独特机会。短期结果将检验遗传多样性如何影响新形成群落的物种多样性，以及物种和遗传多样性如何相互作用影响焦点种群的建立、生长和灭绝。虽然很少应用于遗传多样性-物种多样性的研究，但种群人口学和进化生态学方法在确定遗传多样性和物种多样性之间反馈的机制联系方面具有很大的前景。从长远来看，这些实验将提供给不同的研究人员，以追求广泛的生态问题。

Understanding how landscapes change following human disturbance is increasingly important. Large portions of the Northeastern and Midwestern parts of the US were formerly cleared of native vegetation to support agriculture, and many of the resulting farms were subsequently abandoned. This cycle of modification and abandonment continues. This project will capitalize on planned restoration of abandoned agricultural land in Michigan to establish long-term experiments. These experiments can be used by diverse researchers, including the investigators on this project, to understand how native communities and native biodiversity are restored. The research will engage citizens who are active in butterfly, bird, and plant monitoring programs, along with local K-12 teachers, undergraduate students, and graduate students. The project will strengthen a collaboration among research scientists, the Michigan Division of Natural Resources, and local land owners, who will be engaged in project development. Results from the study, including the experimental plots, will be used as exemplars for future community and private land restoration efforts. The relationship between species diversity and community and ecosystem processes is of fundamental importance in the fields of community and ecosystem ecology. Recent research includes genetic diversity and its influence through potential feedbacks between genetic and species diversity. The large-scale and long-term experimental manipulations that will be established through this project will provide a unique testing ground for understanding the relationships between species and genetic diversity and how these aspects of biodiversity affect population, community, ecosystem, and evolutionary processes under realistic field conditions. To date, most studies have been small in scale and short in duration. Twelve former agricultural fields will be restored to native prairie and experiments will be established that manipulate both species and genetic diversity. This is a unique opportunity to overlay experimental treatments on large-scale restoration. Short-term results will test questions about how genetic diversity affects species diversity in newly assembling communities and how species and genetic diversity interact to affect the establishment, growth, and extinction of focal populations. Although rarely applied in genetic diversity-species diversity work, population demography and evolutionary ecology approaches hold great promise for identifying mechanistic links driving feedbacks between genetic diversity and species diversity. Over the longer-term these experiments will be available to diverse researchers to pursue wide-ranging ecological questions.