Collaborative Research: LTREB: A natural laboratory for studying biodiversity, ecosystem function, and responses to environmental change from Amazonian lowlands to Andean treeline

一个物种生活的地方--它的地理范围--受到气候和它与其他生物的相互作用的影响。影响物种范围的因素很复杂，这些因素如何随着环境的变化而变化取决于长寿生物(如树木)的生活史阶段。植物通过不同的死亡和补充而发生的范围转移是复杂的过程，需要关于成虫和发育早期阶段的人口统计的长期数据，以便进行适当的预测建模。这项研究通过将长期野外数据与最先进的人口和环境建模相结合，用对物种和生态系统对沿海拔梯度的环境变化的反应的机械理解取代了描述性研究。研究结果将促进我们对物种范围转移的理解，这对土地管理者和物种保护工作是重要的。这项研究还将在STEM学科中培训美国本科生和研究生，并推进K-12教育。这项研究基于结构和化学功能特征，促进了物种和生态系统水平对环境变化响应的机械知识。从田间地块收集的数据与先进的人口模型以及航空和卫星遥感相结合，以了解环境如何控制热带森林物种分布、群落组成和生态系统生态。该研究方法将林地调查的大型传统数据集与气象学、结构和化学特征以及遥感结合起来，其中包括高精度和高时间分辨率的生长和死亡数据。这项研究将提出一系列假设，将生命速率与物种对持续和间歇性环境变异性的反应联系起来，以及将个体物种对生态系统性能和功能的反应进行调整。研究集中在树木分布生态学、人口学和森林生态系统生态学问题上，需要长时间序列来了解正在进行的环境变化的影响并检测对瞬时环境变化的响应。在树木等长寿命有机体系统中，这些问题的机械答案需要了解生命率随环境变量的变化，这反过来需要很长的时间才能进行准确的估计。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Where a species lives - its geographic range - is affected by climate and the interactions it has with other living organisms. There is a complex set of factors that influence species ranges, and how these factors change with respect to changing environments depends on the life history stage of long-lived organisms, such as trees. Range shifts in plants that occur through differential mortality versus recruitment are complex processes, requiring long term data on the demography of both adults and the early stages of development for proper predictive modelling. This research replaces descriptive studies with a mechanistic understanding of species and ecosystem responses to environmental changes along elevation gradients by combining long-term field data with state-of-the-art demographic and environmental modeling. The results will advance our understanding of species range shifts, which is important to land managers and species conservation efforts. The study will also train US undergraduate and graduate students in STEM disciplines, and advance K-12 education.This research advances mechanistic knowledge of species- and ecosystem-level responses to environmental changes based on structural and chemical functional traits. Data gathered from field plots are coupled with advanced demographic modelling and airborne and satellite remote sensing to understand how the environment controls tropical forest species distributions, community composition, and ecosystem ecology. The research approach couples a large, traditional data set of forest plot inventories, which includes high precision and high temporal resolution growth and mortality data, with meteorology, structural and chemical traits, and remote sensing. A series of hypotheses centered on linking vital rates to species responses to ongoing and episodic environmental variability, as well as scaling individual species responses to ecosystem performance and function will be addressed with this research. The research centers on questions of tree distributional ecology, demography, and forest ecosystem ecology requiring long time-series to understand effects of ongoing environmental change and to detect responses to transient environmental change. Mechanistic answers to these questions in systems of long-lived organisms, such as trees, require understanding variation in vital rates conditional on environmental variables, which in turn require long time periods for accurate estimation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.