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正在导致许多物种灭绝。生态学家面临的一个关键挑战是找到防止这种物种灭绝的方法。这是一项复杂的工作，必须考虑物种的进化历史，以帮助预测它们的未来。使这项工作更具挑战性的是，气候变化正在导致与过去不同的环境条件的组合。这意味着预测未来需要外推。为了让这些预测更可靠，这个研究项目正在测试物种对近年来一些相当剧烈的气候变化的反应，并考虑这些变化可能如何反映整个美洲特定物种群体的过去进化。我们还在离家更近的地方探索这些问题，方法是在最近几年我们看到气候变化很多的地区，如艾伯塔省西部和渥太华周围地区，对蝴蝶群落进行密集的实地采样，我们也知道那里的许多物种已经开始对气候变化做出反应。换句话说，在这些地区的实地工作可能会发现我们正在寻找的影响，如果这些影响确实存在的话。通过对可能影响物种和整个物种群体如何应对气候和土地利用变化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.