Reconciling food security and biodiversity conservation: an integrative modelling approach

也许未来几十年最大的社会挑战将是制定办法，使我们能够可持续地养活世界上不断增长的人口。然而，实现粮食安全将不可避免地带来重大挑战，一个关键问题是如何在不对生物多样性造成重大负面影响的情况下实现大幅增加的全球粮食产量1？在这个项目中，学生将与生态建模(在阿伯丁)和土地利用建模(在爱丁堡)方面的世界领先团体合作，开发一种综合建模方法，使替代的土地利用未来能够根据它们在一系列空间尺度上对生物多样性的可能影响进行评估。重要的是，该项目将使学生能够专注于两个关键的生物体群体--传粉者和作物害虫，以探索土地利用的变化如何影响它们的空间动态，以及可能对作物生产力和随后的土地利用决策的反馈。改进对气候变化下的生物多样性的预测是生态学家面临的主要挑战2。我们需要预测气候变化将如何改变生物多样性，以评估替代土地使用和气候变化情景的影响，并指导防止生物圈严重破坏的计划。已经开发了许多生态模型来了解气候变化的影响，但这些模型存在一些缺陷。当前模型的一个主要疏漏是，它们忽略了土地利用的空间格局的变化，以及这些格局将在不同的空间尺度上对生物多样性反应产生的影响。阿伯丁的特拉维斯团队是开发生物多样性对不断变化的土地利用和气候情景的反应的机械方法的领域领导者，最近发布了软件RangeShifter。爱丁堡的团队拥有互补的专业知识，在土地使用和食品安全研究和建模3方面获得国际认可，并发布了从地方到国家和全球规模的模型(例如Aporia、Crafty和Plum)。土地利用和生态模型的结合将为探索生态反应和土地利用模式之间潜在的复杂和动态的相互作用提供新的手段。兰开斯特小组(阿伯丁)研究气候变化对生物相互作用的影响，并将提供指导，分析关于昆虫分布的大规模数据集，以了解土地利用变化与昆虫生物多样性之间的相互影响。在这一博士学位中，学生将接受开发和应用基于个体和基于主体的模型的培训，以便他们获得联合使用这些方法的技能，以解决与农业集约或扩展和生物多样性动态之间的相互作用有关的一些关键问题。学生将有相当大的空间在广泛的范围内指导项目的确切方向，但我们预计以下几组问题可能是优先考虑的：1.主要由农业集约化和扩展驱动的未来土地利用变化将在多大程度上降低物种跟踪气候变化的能力？2.改变农业实践对不同作物害虫的流行和影响可能产生什么影响？3.农业实践模式的变化将如何影响传粉者的区域持久性？

Perhaps the single greatest societal challenge of the coming decades will be to develop approaches that enable us to sustainably feed the World's growing human population. However, delivering food security will inevitably pose major challenges and one key issue is how can a substantially increased global food production be delivered without major negative impacts on biodiversity1? In this project, the student will work with World-leading groups in ecological modelling (at Aberdeen) and in land-use modelling (at Edinburgh) to develop an integrated modelling approach that enables alternative land-use futures to be assessed in terms of their likely impacts on biodiversity at a range of spatial scales. Importantly, the project will allow the student to focus on two key groups of organisms, pollinators and crop pests, to explore how changing land-use may impact their spatial dynamics, with likely feedbacks on crop productivity and subsequent land-use decisions.Improving the forecast for biodiversity under climate change is a major challenge for ecologists2. We need to predict how climate change will alter biodiversity to assess the impacts of alternative land-use and climate change scenarios and guide plans for preventing serious damage to the biosphere. Many ecological models have been developed to understand climate change impacts, but these have a number of failings. A major omission in current models is that they ignore the changing spatial patterns of land-use and the impact that these will have, at different spatial scales, on biodiversity responses. The Travis group at Aberdeen are field leaders in developing mechanistic approaches for forecasting biodiversity responses to changing land-use and climate scenarios, recently publishing the software, RangeShifter. The group at Edinburgh have complementary expertise, being internationally recognised for land use and food security research and modelling3, with published models operating from local to national and global scales (e.g. Aporia, CRAFTY and PLUM). Integrating land-use and ecological models will provide a novel means for exploring the potentially complex and dynamic interplay between ecological responses and land-use patterns. The Lancaster group (Aberdeen) studies the effects of climate change on biotic interactions, and will provide guidance on analysing large-scale datasets on insect distributions to understand interactive effects between land use change and insect biodiversity. In this PhD, the student will be provided with training in the development and application of individual and agent based models in order that they gain the skills to make joint use of the approaches to address some key questions related to the interactions between agricultural intensification or expansion, and biodiversity dynamics. The student will be provided with considerable scope to steer the exact direction of the project within the broad remit but we anticipate the following sets of questions being likely priorities:1. To what degree will future land-use change, driven largely by agricultural intensification and expansion, reduce the ability of species' to track changing climate?2. What are the likely impacts of changing agricultural practice on the prevalence and impact of different crop pests?3. How will changing patterns of agricultural practice influence the regional persistence of pollinators?