Towards a more predictive community ecology: integrating functional traits and disequilibrium

想象一下，你去一家园艺商店，买了各种各样的蔬菜种子包出售。把它们都种在一块光秃秃的土地上，然后试着预测哪个特定的品种在季节结束时可以收获。即使是最好的生态科学也会被这个简单的挑战所阻碍。一个悬而未决的问题是预测或控制社区的动态，无论是菜园还是热带森林。这项工作的目标是发展生物多样性理论，可以跨越从个人到社区到生态系统的尺度。更具预测性的生态科学可以1)描述在不同空间尺度上或跨空间尺度运行的过程和机制；2)对特定系统的生物多样性动态产生可证伪的预测。为了实现这些目标，我将测试两个关键观点：首先，有机体的生理学需要建立在人口增长模型中；其次，生理和环境之间的匹配并不一定是最佳的，因为生物体对快速变化的滞后反应导致了不平衡。在接下来的五年里，我将在一系列长期研究地点扩展和测试这些想法，这些地点横跨马来西亚的低地热带地区到科罗拉多州的高山地区。

Imagine going to a garden store and buying every kind of vegetable seed packet for sale. Sow them all in a patch of bare ground, and then try to predict which particular species will be harvestable at the end of the season. Even the best ecological science is stymied by this simple challenge. An open problem is predicting or controlling the dynamics of communities, whether they are vegetable gardens or tropical forests. The goal of this work is to develop biodiversity theory that can link across scales from individuals to communities to ecosystems. A more predictive ecological science could 1) delineate the processes and mechanisms that operate at or across different spatial scales and 2) generate falsifiable predictions for biodiversity dynamics in specific systems over time. To begin to address these aims, I will test two key ideas: first, that organisms' physiology needs to be built in to models of population growth; and second, that the matching between physiology and environment is not necessarily optimal, because of disequilibrium caused by lagged responses of organisms to rapid change. Over the next five years I will expand and test these ideas in a set of long-term study sites spanning the lowland tropics of Malaysia to the high alpine of Colorado.