OPUS: CRS -- A Cross-Scale Synthesis in a Disturbance-Mediated System: Integrating Population, Community, and Metacommunity Perspectives

我们生活在一个环境迅速变化的时代，对物种的生存能力和生态系统的繁荣发展提出了挑战。因此，了解生物对环境干扰的反应是很重要的。该项目将使用一组长期数据来确定波多黎各的飓风和干旱如何影响蜗牛和蛞蝓的生活。 这些生物看起来微不足道，但事实并非如此--它们在森林中扮演着重要的角色，它们分解死去的植物，回收养分。然而，它们日益受到异常强烈的飓风和严重干旱的威胁。该项目的主要目标是预测种群和物种群如何随时间变化。蜗牛和蛞蝓对环境变化的抵抗力或脆弱性如何？为什么？ 我们能从他们身上学到什么？除了对长期数据进行新的分析外，研究人员还将综合他过去工作的结果，重点关注在不同尺度上发生的变化以及在这些尺度上以某种方式联系起来的变化。该项目还将通过提供课程，将基础和应用环境科学、统计学和地理学的学生和教师团队聚集在一起，共同学习坚韧的环境挑战，从而帮助打破学科障碍。综合研究将产生理论和实证发现，整合干扰和演替、跨尺度相互作用和元生态学的观点。一本专著将侧重于概念的提炼和整合理论的干扰和继承与元生态系统。第二个专题将集中在长期的时空模式在人口，社区和metacquitities的水平。种群水平的属性包括发生率（存在-不存在）和丰度，而群落水平的属性包括物种丰富度，均匀度，优势度，多样性和稀有度。每个指标将被分解成空间分量的基础上乘法和加法模型，以了解层次空间结构如何响应干扰，随后在二次演替的变化。元能力分析将整合基于过程的（即，斑块动力学、物种分类、质量效应和中性）和基于模式的（即，相干性，范围营业额和范围边界聚集）的方法来理解的方式，其中变性随时间变化的飓风易发系统。方差分解的分层方法将用于量化由环境特征、未知来源的空间变化和空间结构化环境变化解释的独特变化。探讨了几种新的时空变化统计方法，包括：（1）干预分析或分段回归;（2）广义线性混合模型框架;以及（3）多变量时间序列方法和同时推理程序，适应泊松或负二项误差项的稀有或不常见的物种。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得的通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来提供支持。

We live in a time of rapid environmental change, challenging the ability of species to persist and of ecosystems to thrive. Thus, it is important to understand how living things respond to environmental disturbances. This project will use a long-term data set to determine how hurricanes and droughts in Puerto Rico have affected the lives of snails and slugs. These creatures may seem trivial but are not -- they play an important role in forests by breaking down dead plants and recycling nutrients. Yet, they are increasingly threatened by unusually strong hurricanes and harsh droughts. The main goal of this project is to predict how populations and groups of species change over time. How resistant or vulnerable are snails and slugs to environmental change, and why? What can we learn from them? In addition to new analyses of long-term data, the researcher will synthesize results of his past work, focusing on changes that take place at different scales and thatare somehow linked across those scales. The project will also help break down disciplinary barriers by offering courses that bring together teams of students and faculty from basic and applied environmental sciences, statistics and geography to learn together about tough environmental challenges.Synthetic research will produce theoretical and empirical discoveries that integrate perspectives on disturbance and succession, cross-scale interactions, and metacommunities. A monograph will focus on conceptual refinement and integration of theory on disturbance and succession with that on metacommunities. A second monograph will focus on long-term spatiotemporal patterns at the levels of populations, communities, and metacommunities. Population-level attributes include incidence (presence-absence) and abundance, whereas community-level attributes comprise species richness, evenness, dominance, diversity, and rarity. Each metric will be decomposed into spatial components based on multiplicative and additive models to understand how the hierarchical spatial structure responds to disturbances and subsequently changes during secondary succession. Metacommunity analyses will integrate process-based (i.e., patch dynamics, species sorting, mass effects, and neutrality) and pattern-based (i.e., coherence, range turnover, and range boundary clumping) approaches for understanding the ways in which metacommunities change over time in a hurricane-prone system. A hierarchical approach to variance decomposition will be used to quantify unique variation explained by environmental characteristics, spatial variation of unknown origin, and spatially structured environmental variation. Several emerging statistical approaches for understanding spatiotemporal variation will be explored, including (1) intervention analysis or segmented regression; (2) extended generalized linear mixed model frameworks; and (3) multivariate time series approaches and simultaneous inference procedures that accommodate Poisson or negative binomial error terms for rare or uncommon species.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.