Interactions between sources of environmental change: How do resource quality and coloured environments drive multi-trophic eco-evolutionary dynamics?

环境变化存在于所有自然生态系统中。了解它如何影响一个物种内的个体，改变他们的种群规模以及物种之间的相互作用，是生态学的基石。天气的季节模式、干旱或洪涝时段以及厄尔尼诺现象等大规模区域气候变化，都是世界各地环境变化的例子。鉴于未来气候变化对生物多样性的影响，这一基本的生态过程现在对科学家和社会来说是一个极其重要和紧迫的问题。最近的气候变暖导致了一系列物种的反应，例如种群地理分布的纬度和海拔变化以及关键生命周期事件的时间变化，这可能会增加灭绝风险。例如，厄尔尼诺现象的发生频率正在增加，这将对世界大片地区的生物多样性产生重大影响。环境变化的这些变化将影响我们预测物种及其相互作用将如何应对气候变化的能力，对自然种群的管理具有重要影响，如渔业和生物病虫害防治。环境条件的变化可以类似于可见光光谱中的不同颜色。快速环境变化在“蓝色”环境中占主导地位(短波长在蓝光中最重要)；缓慢变化在“红色”环境中占主导地位(在红光中最重要)；“白色”环境是随机的；快速和缓慢变化的平等混合。我们将侧重于物种如何对可能相互作用的两个环境变化来源做出反应；温度波动(特别是这些波动的颜色)，这是物种对气候变化反应的关键驱动因素；以及食物质量的变化，这是环境退化的衡量标准。我们将在实验室实验中研究这些环境变化对昆虫和寄生蜂之间关系的影响。这种昆虫在世界各地都是一种害虫，所以我们将了解害虫物种将如何应对气候变化。寄生蜂是一类高度多样化的生物体，在生态群落和调节农作物害虫方面发挥着至关重要的作用。除了告诉我们捕食者和猎物对环境变化的一般反应外，我们还将了解这是否会在未来导致更多的害虫问题。实验室系统已经被用来回答生态学和进化论中的问题，这些问题在现场是极其困难的。正如我们所建议的那样，当与数学模型相结合时，它们极大地提高了我们对入侵、生物防治和收获的理解。环境变化对生物多样性影响的理论最近受到了相当大的关注，但我们将发展这一理论，以更准确地反映许多物种的生物学。一些物种一年只繁殖一次(先前理论的重点)，但许多其他物种全年持续繁殖(本研究的重点)，面临着季节内和季节之间不断变化的条件。我们还对环境变化是否会影响物种的重要特征感兴趣，例如它们需要多长时间才能发育，或者它们的体型是否会发生变化，以及这些变化如何影响它们的丰富度。为了充分理解这些可能正在适应环境变化的不断繁殖的种群，我们必须开发新的数学方法。我们将发展环境变化理论，并将其与我们的实验室系统联系起来。我们将研究环境变化是否会导致潜在的意想不到的种群数量模式，以及它是否会改变物种灭绝的风险。这些新颖的实验将测试模型的工作情况，通过使用实验中的新信息更新模型来改进它们。

Environmental variation is in all natural ecosystems. Understanding how it affects individuals within a species, changes their population size and interactions between species is the bedrock of ecology. Seasonal patterns in weather, periods of drought or flooding and large-scale regional climate changes, such as El Niño, are examples of environmental variation across the world. Given the future impacts of climate change on biodiversity, this fundamental ecological process is now an incredibly important and urgent issue for scientists and society. Recent climate warming has resulted in a range of species responses, such as latitudinal and altitudinal shifts in the geographic distribution of populations and changes in the timing of key life cycle events, which may increase extinction risks. For example, El Niño events are increasing in frequency, which will have a dramatic impact on biodiversity across large regions of the world. These changes in environmental variation will affect our ability to predict how species and their interactions will respond to climate change, with important implications for the management of natural populations, such as fisheries and biological pest control.Changes in environmental conditions can be thought of in a similar way to the different colours in the visible light spectrum. Rapid environmental changes dominate in "blue" environments (short wavelengths are most important in blue light); slow changes dominate in "red" environments (long wavelengths are most important in red light); "white" environments are random; an equal mixture of fast and slow changes. We will focus on how species respond to two sources of environmental variation that may interact with each other; fluctuations in temperature (specifically the colour of those fluctuations), a key driver of species' responses to climate change, and variation in food quality, which is a measure of environmental degradation. We will study the impact of these environmental changes on the relationship between an insect and a parasitic wasp in lab experiments. The insect is a pest around the world, so we will learn about how pest species will respond to climate change. Parasitic wasps are a highly diverse group of organisms that play a crucial role in ecological communities and in regulating insect crop pests. As well as informing us about how predators and prey respond to environmental variation generally, we will learn whether this might lead to more pest problems in the future. Laboratory systems have been used to answer questions in ecology and evolution that are extremely difficult to address in the field. When combined with mathematical models, as we propose to do, they have greatly improved our understanding of invasion, biological control and harvesting.The theory underlying the impact of environmental variation on biodiversity has received considerable attention recently, but we will develop this theory to more accurately reflect the biology of many species. Some species only reproduce once a year (the focus of previous theory), but many others reproduce continuously throughout the year (the focus of this study), facing constantly changing conditions within and across seasons. We are also interested in whether environmental change will affect important traits of species, such as how long they take to develop or if their body size changes, and how those changes affect their abundance. To fully understand these continuously reproducing populations that may be adapting to environmental change, we have to develop new mathematical approaches. We will develop the theory of environmental variation and link this to our laboratory system. We will study whether environmental variation causes potentially unexpected patterns in population size and whether it will change the risk of species going extinct. The novel experiments will test how well the models work, improving them by updating them with the new information from the experiments.