Impacts of environmental change on the structure and function of macroecological communities

了解和预测气候和土地利用变化对生态群落影响的任务通常集中在理论模型或实验方法上，与在更大时空尺度上运行的复杂多物种系统的相关性可能有限。事实证明，从基础理论和实验推广到气候变化下生物多样性和相关过程的大规模预测的尝试具有挑战性，主要是因为机械模型难以捕捉整个生态系统的复杂性。该项目旨在通过将最近汇编的全球生物信息学数据集与新开发的模型相结合，以更广泛的宏观生态学视角来理解生物多样性对环境变化的当前和未来反应，包括进化史、物种特征和生物相互作用。该学生将可以使用威利斯教授及其同事开发的基于地理信息系统的现有未来气候变化范围预测，以及土地利用变化对全球生物多样性影响的predict数据库。该项目将把重点放在鸟类上，因为它们在生态上很重要，在地理分布、系统发育和功能特征方面相对知名，而且它们的多样性（11,000种）足以在全球范围内更深入地了解复杂的多维过程。主要研究目标如下：1)综合和细化所有鸟类的空间发生、种群密度和生态估算，量化生态系统在种子传播、传粉和害虫防治等关键生态过程中的现状和恢复力。2)将功能性状和系统发育数据集与土地利用变化和气候变化情景相结合，了解未来生物多样性响应（人口减少、范围转移和收缩）对生态系统稳定性和生态系统服务提供的可能影响。3)利用数据可用性和计算能力方面的最新进展，开发生物现实的预测模型，并将其应用于环境政策。

The mission to understand and predict the effects of climate and land-use change on ecological communities has most often focused on theoretical models or experimental approaches with potentially limited relevance to complex multi-species systems operating at larger spatial and temporal scales. Attempts to generalise from underlying theory and experiments to broad-scale predictions of biodiversity and associated processes under climate change have proved challenging, largely because mechanistic models struggle to capture the complexity of whole ecosystems. This studentship aims to take a broader macroecological perspective by combining recently compiled global bioinformatics datasets with newly developed models designed to understand current and future responses of biodiversity to environmental change accounting for evolutionary history, species traits and biotic interactions. The student will have access to existing future GIS-based range projections under climate change developed by Prof Willis and colleagues, and the PREDICTS database of land-use change impacts on global biodiversity. The project will focus on birds because they are ecologically important and relatively well known in terms of geographic distribution, phylogeny, and functional traits, as well as being sufficiently diverse (11,000 species) to provide deeper insight into complex multi-dimensional processes at global scales. The main research goals are as follows: 1) Combining and refining estimates of spatial occurrence, population density and ecology for all birds to quantify the current condition and resilience of ecosystems in terms of key ecological processes, including seed dispersal, pollination and pest control. 2) Integrating functional trait and phylogenetic datasets with land-use change and climate change scenarios to understand the likely implications of future biodiversity responses (population declines, range shifts and contractions) for the stability of ecosystems and the provision of ecosystem services. 3) Capitalising on recent advances in data availability and computational power to develop biologically realistic forecasting models with applications to environmental policy.