Quantifying the Resilience and Functioning of Freshwater Ecosystems Across Spatial and Temporal Gradients of Environmental Stress

随着我们的气候变化，自然和半自然系统将如何适应极端事件仍然是生态学中的一个紧迫问题。生态系统对多种环境压力非常敏感，而且往往是相互作用的，例如农业集约化和气候变化，这些压力在时空尺度上的分布和强度各不相同，并且具有区域差异(例如地理气候)。这可能导致影响，从而改变生态系统的结构和功能属性。因此，这给生态系统带来了巨大的压力，减少了生态系统服务。生态系统应对压力的能力是有限的，因此，当系统的适应能力被超过时，它们被预测经历制度转变，尽管最近的研究表明，这种转变缺乏经验证据(Hillebrand等人)。2020)。该项目将侧重于LOTIC系统在环境压力和社区复原力的梯度上吸收、适应和恢复间歇性干扰的能力。该项目是与北爱尔兰农业-食品和生物科学研究所(AFBI)合作的案例学生，将通过实验量化和评估不同生态复原力措施(Holling，1973)和多种生态稳定性措施(Donohue等人)的相对优点。2013)。因此，该项目提供了评估生态稳定性变化的机制的机会，并将尝试量化特定物种对包括可变性、抗性和恢复(工程复原力)在内的多种稳定性措施的贡献。重点将放在淡水无脊椎动物和底栖生物膜群落结构上，重点是量化物种之间的相互作用，以及功能(例如体重、营养水平和营养作用)和结构特性(例如丰富度和丰富度)，以支持对不同稳定性概念及其在应用管理中的相关性的基本探索。

How natural and semi-natural systems will adapt to extreme events as our climate changes remains a pressing question in ecology. Ecosystems are highly sensitive to multiple, and often interacting, environmental pressures, such as agricultural intensification and climate change, which vary in distribution and intensity across spatiotemporal scales, and with regional variations (e.g. geo-climate). This can result in impacts, which alters both the structural and functional properties of the ecosystems. Consequently, this places ecosystems under significant stress, reducing ecosystem services. The capacity of an ecosystem to deal with stress is finite, and consequently they are predicted to undergo regime shifts when the adaptive capacity of the system is exceeded, although recent studies demonstrate a lack of empirical evidence for such shifts (Hillebrand et al. 2020). This project will focus on the capacity of lotic systems to absorb, adapt and recover from episodic disturbances across a gradient of environmental stress and community resilience. The project is a CASE studentship in collaboration with the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI) in Northern Ireland and will experimentally quantify and assess the relative merits of different measures of ecological resilience (Holling 1973) and multiple measures of ecological stability (Donohue et al. 2013). This project, therefore, offers the opportunity to evaluate the mechanisms that underpin variation in ecological stability and will attempt to quantify empirically species-specific contributions to multiple measures of stability including variability, resistance and recovery (engineering resilience). Emphasis will be placed on freshwater invertebrate and benthic biofilm community structure, with a focus on quantifying species interactions, and both functional (e.g. body mass, trophic level and trophic role) and structural properties (e.g. abundances and richness) to support a fundamental exploration of different stability concepts and their relevance in applied management.