NERC-MOST Biodiversity change: integrating taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity

全球变暖、环境变化/退化以及人类活动对世界生物多样性造成了前所未有的威胁。如何量化和估计生物多样性的变化——生物多样性是如何随时间变化的——已经成为生物学、生态学、进化、环境科学、生物信息学和相关研究领域最紧迫的问题之一。需要具有良好的数学/统计特性并支持关于多样性的生物学推理的稳健和有意义的多样性测量。迄今为止，大部分的努力都是针对定量的分类多样性，即物种的相对丰度和组成。然而，现在人们认识到生物多样性具有多个维度，并且必须考虑系统发育和功能多样性。幸运的是，我们对系统发育和物种特征的广泛收集的理解取得了显著进展，为测量和评估生物多样性变化的创新方法打开了大门。与此同时，这也是一个复杂的挑战；要解决这个问题，生态学家和数学家/统计学家之间的合作至关重要。这一项目将在新的合作中汇集世界上评估生物多样性的专家。其目标是建立一个综合的数学和统计框架，以量化和估计分类、系统发育和功能多样性的变化，重点是BioTIME数据库。这项工作的重点将是生态组合，以及它们如何随时间变化。项目的合作伙伴是桑德拉·迪亚兹（阿根廷），她是功能多样性量化领域的世界领导者，以及赵又廷（她领导了这项工作的MOST部分），她因在生物多样性量化方面的统计贡献而享誉全球。他们将与英国（圣安德鲁斯）团队（Anne Magurran和Maria Dornelas）合作，他们率先在分类多样性中量化了生物多样性的变化。新的方法将允许基于生物多样性的所有三个维度（分类、功能、系统发育）对α、β和γ多样性的变化进行严格的分析。访问BioTIME数据库（BioTIME .st-andrews.ac）。英国)，目前世界上最大的集合时间序列存储库，将提供该方法的概念证明。我们还将开发适当的用户友好的、自我解释的软件，并提供在线版本，并维护一个网站，其中包括在这个项目中开发的所有软件和统计工具。通过向博士后提供一些短期访问奖学金，他们将有机会研究分析的关键组成部分，我们将增加合作的全球影响力。讲习班将提供进一步的机会来传播调查结果和确保合作的未来。因此，该项目将在过去没有机会合作的研究人员之间建立强有力的伙伴关系，同时为紧迫的生态挑战提供创新的解决方案。

Global warming, environmental change/degradation and human activities have led to an unprecedented threat to the world's biodiversity. How to quantify and estimate biodiversity change - how biodiversity is changing over time - has become one of the most pressing issues in biology, ecology, evolution, environmental science, bioinformatics, and related research fields. Robust and meaningful diversity measures that possess good mathematical/statistical properties and support biological reasoning about diversity are required. To date, most of the effort has been directed towards quantifying taxonomic diversity - i.e. species relative abundance and composition. However, it is now recognized that biodiversity has multiple dimensions and that it is essential to consider phylogenetic and functional diversity as well. Fortunately, remarkable progress in our understanding of phylogenies and the extensive collection of species traits opens the door to innovative approaches to the measurement and assessment of biodiversity change. At the same time, this is a complex challenge; collaboration among ecologists and mathematicians/statisticians is essential to tackle it. This project will bring together world experts in the assessment of biodiversity, in a new collaboration. Its goal is to develop an integrated mathematical and statistical framework to quantify and estimate changes in taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity, focusing on the BioTIME database. The focus of the work will be ecological assemblages, and how they change through time. Project partners are Sandra Diaz (Argentina), a world leader in quantifying functional diversity, and Anne Chao (leading the MOST component of the work) who is globally renowned for her statistical contributions to the quantification of biodiversity. They will collaborate with the UK (St Andrews) team (Anne Magurran and Maria Dornelas) who have pioneered the quantification of biodiversity change in taxonomic diversity. The new methodology will permit rigorous analysis of diversity changes for alpha, beta and gamma diversities based on all three dimensions of biodiversity (taxonomic, functional, phylogenetic). Access to the BioTIME database (biotime.st-andrews.ac.uk), currently the world's largest repository of assemblage time series, will provide a proof of concept of the methodology. We will also develop appropriate user-friendly, self-interpreting software, complete with online versions, and maintain a website featuring all software and statistical tools developed in this project. By offering a number of short visiting fellowships to postdocs, who will have an opportunity to work on key components of the analyses, we will increase the global reach of the collaboration. A workshop will provide a further opportunity to disseminate findings and secure the future of the collaboration. The project will thus forge a strong partnership between researchers who have not had the opportunity to work together in the past, while providing innovative solutions to an urgent ecological challenge.