Using global change as a pseudo-experiment to build and test macroecological hypotheses

众所周知，气候和土地利用的变化导致许多物种灭绝。生态学家面临的一个关键挑战是找到防止这种灭绝的方法。这是一项复杂的工作，必须考虑到物种的进化历史，以帮助预测它们的未来。使这项工作更具挑战性的事实是，气候变化正在导致与过去不同的环境条件组合。这意味着预测未来需要外推。为了使这些预测更加可靠，这个研究项目正在对物种如何对近年来一些相当剧烈的气候变化做出反应进行测试，并考虑这些变化如何反映整个美洲特定物种群体过去的进化。我们在研究这些问题的同时，也对近年来气候变化严重的地区，如阿尔伯塔西部和渥太华周围地区的蝴蝶群落进行了密集的实地采样，我们也知道，在这些地区，许多物种已经开始对气候变化做出反应。换句话说，在这些领域的实地工作很可能发现我们正在寻找的影响，如果这些影响存在的话。通过对可能影响物种和整个物种群体如何对气候和土地利用变化作出反应的生物机制进行不同的测试，我们希望为政策制定者提供更好的工具来管理国内外的生物多样性。

Climate and land use changes are known to be causing many species to go extinct. A key challenge for ecologists is to discover ways to prevent such extinctions. This is a complicated job that must take account of species' evolutionary pasts to help predict their future. Making this job even more challenging is the fact that climate changes are leading to combinations of environmental conditions that are different than those in the past. That means that predicting the future requires extrapolation. To help make those predictions more reliable, this research program is pursuing tests of how species have responded to some of the quite dramatic climate changes of recent years, and considering how those changes may reflect the past evolution within particular groups of species throughout the Americas. We are pursuing these questions closer to home also by leading intensive field sampling of butterfly communities in regions where we have seen a lot of climate change in recent years, like western Alberta and the region around Ottawa, and where we also know that many species have begun to respond to climate changes. In other words, field work in these areas is likely to detect the effects we are looking for, if those effects exist at all. By putting different tests of biological mechanisms that may affect how species and whole groups of species respond to climate and land use changes, we hope to arm policy makers with better tools to manage biodiversity at home and abroad.