The neglected role of environmental fluctuations as modulator of stress and driver of rapid evolution.

气候变化不仅将改变环境手段，而且还将增加手段的可变性，特别是极端事件的强度。非生物因素的这种变异性要么会对生物体和生态系统造成额外的压力，要么可能提供暂时的避难所。变率增加相对于平均应力增加（例如海洋变暖）的作用是气候研究中最近出现的一个主题，但实际上尚未探索海洋系统。我们假设，波动的温度应力将非常不同地影响海洋生物相比，恒定的应力相同的意思，和两个额外的尺寸的应力制度，幅度（应力强度）和频率（应力持续时间），不同的能力，以调节生物体的应力敏感性。我们进一步假设，环境变化是快速进化变化的关键驱动力。这些假设将在波罗的海关键物种上进行三年的测试，使用新型的计算机控制的室内围隔生态系统设施。通过将可变性的新方面纳入实验评估，我们将能够大幅改善对未来生态系统变化的预测，以应对全球变化。

Climate change will not only shift environmental means but will also increase the variability around means and specifically the intensity of extreme events. This variability in abiotic factors will either exert additional stress to organisms and ecosystems or potentially offers transient refuge from stress. The role of increased variability vs. increase in mean stress (from e.g. ocean warming) is a recently emerging topic in climate research but is virtually unexplored for marine systems. We hypothesize that fluctuating temperature stress will very differently affect marine organisms as compared to constant stress of the same mean, and that the two additional dimensions of a stress regime, amplitude (stress intensity) and frequency (stress duration), differ in their capacity to modulate the stress sensitivity of organisms. We further hypothesize that environmental variability is a key driver for rapid evolutionary change. These hypotheses will be tested over three years on Baltic Sea key species, using novel computer-controlled indoor mesocosm facilities. By including the new aspect of variability into experimental assessments, we will be able to substantially improve our predictions of future ecosystem shifts in response to global change.