Collaborative Research: BoCP-Implementation: The impact of climate change on functional biodiversity across spatiotemporal scales at Lake Tanganyika, Africa

坦噶尼喀湖以其生物多样性而闻名，但在这个庞大而古老的生态系统中，壮观的生命正受到气温升高的威胁，其威胁方式尚不清楚。作为撒哈拉以南非洲最多产的内陆渔场之一，健康的坦噶尼喀湖对四个发展中国家的营养至关重要。如果全球变暖改变了影响坦噶尼喀湖鱼类生产的内部过程，那么数百万人的粮食安全将受到影响。此外，气候变化对构成坦噶尼喀湖开放水域和湖底群落的不同群体特征的影响以及这些群体之间的相互作用尚不清楚。本项目旨在利用沉积物、化石和遗传工具研究坦噶尼喀湖食物网对几种不同气候变化情景的响应。该项目的结果将揭示水生生物，特别是具有经济价值的鱼类，如何对大型热带湖泊的温度和降水变化作出反应。有了这些信息，渔业和生态系统管理者将更好地在其责任范围内保护粮食资源和生物多样性。最后，该项目将包括强有力的国际伙伴关系，以培训学生、举办讲习班和编写面向公众的材料。该项目将利用坦噶尼喀湖的高分辨率沉积记录，建立一系列历史实验，以追踪整个湖泊的功能生物多样性。该框架整合了地球化学、化石和基因组工具，以评估不同气候变化情景下开放水域和底栖群落的结构和功能，以及关键生物对这些变化的物理和生理反应。由于全新世的水文气候条件在历史数据中代表性不足，这种方法为评估环境变化对坦噶尼喀湖食物网的影响提供了机会，这在以前是不可能知道的。此外，该项目将确定湖泊中各种动物对气候波动的共同和不同反应，并将这些反应与基于特征的社区聚集和功能理解联系起来。这项工作具有预测大型热带湖泊在严重气候不确定性下生物多样性变化的潜力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并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，被认为值得支持。

Lake Tanganyika is renowned for its biodiversity, but the spectacular life in this vast and ancient ecosystem is threatened by warming temperatures in ways that are not well-understood. As one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most prolific inland fisheries, a healthy Lake Tanganyika is critically important to the nutrition of four developing nations. If global warming alters internal processes that affect the fish production in Lake Tanganyika, then the food security for millions of people will suffer. Moreover, the impacts of climate change on the characteristics of different groups making up Lake Tanganyika’s open water and lake floor communities, as well as interactions among these groups, are unknown. This project aims to study the response of Lake Tanganyika’s food web to several different scenarios of climate change using sediments, fossils, and genetic tools. The results of the project will reveal how aquatic organisms, particularly economically valuable fish, respond to changes in temperature and precipitation within large tropical lakes. With this information, fisheries and ecosystem managers will be better equipped to safeguard food resources and biodiversity in their areas of responsibility. Finally, this project will include strong international partnership to train students, conduct workshops and develop materials for public audiences.This project will use Lake Tanganyika’s high-resolution sedimentary record to set up a series of historical experiments to track functional biodiversity lake-wide. This framework integrates geochemical, fossil, and genomic tools to assess open water and bottom-dwelling community structures and functions under different scenarios of climate change, as well as the physical and physiological responses of key organisms to these changes. Because the hydroclimatic conditions of the Holocene are underrepresented in historical data, this approach provides the opportunity to evaluate the consequences of environmental change for Lake Tanganyika’s food web in a way that was previously impossible to know. In addition, the project will identify shared and divergent responses to climatic fluctuations across the lake’s diverse fauna, and link these responses to trait-based understanding of community assembly and functioning. This work holds potential for predicting changes in biodiversity amidst severe climatic uncertainty in large tropical lakes.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.