Toward a general framework for how environmental change affects herbivore-plant interactions

我们的社会依赖于生态系统生产的商品和服务。其中包括碳封存， 植物生长和海鲜生产。当今科学家面临的一个主要挑战是理解为什么这些 功能因地而异，并预测它们未来可能如何随着气候变化而变化。 尽管生态系统是高度复杂的，在我的研究中，理解这种复杂性是很重要的 我采取的方法是，我们可以通过关注非常 环境温度对生态过程的速度和结果的简单、普遍的影响。 环境温度一般会影响基本的生物过程。我们可以用这个将军 温度对预测复杂生态系统如何响应环境变化的影响 温度，如季节、纬度或全球气候变化所引起的。有证据表明，气候变暖 加强草食动物对植物的影响，无论草食动物是昆虫、鱼类还是浮游动物，以及我 建议使用实验和理论来测试温度的小幅升高对 植物上的食草动物。我的研究小组将测试气候变暖对浮游生物食物网的影响，并使用 将我们的实验结果应用于支持鱼类的大规模自然系统的模型 世界海洋的产量、碳封存和生物多样性。 我的团队的研究将产生证据和模型，直接为气候如何预测提供信息 变化会影响生态系统。这类信息代表了科学的前沿，在过去的 气候权威机构--政府间气候变化专门委员会(IPCC)的最新报告 改变科学和影响。因此，我们的工作将有助于更广泛地理解生态 现在和未来的系统。

Our society relies on goods and services produced by ecological systems. These include carbon sequestration, plant growth and seafood production. One major challenge facing scientists today is to understand why these functions vary from place to place, and to anticipate how they might change in the future with climate change. Though ecological systems are highly complex, and this complexity is important to understand, in my research I take the approach that we can understand a substantial amount of ecological change by focusing on very simple, general effects of environmental temperature on the rates and outcomes of ecological processes. Environmental temperature affects fundamental biological processes in general ways. We can use this general effect of temperature to project how complex ecological systems respond to environmental variation in temperature, as occurs with season, latitude or global climate change. Evidence suggests that warming strengthens the impacts of herbivores on plants, whether the herbivores are insects or fish or zooplankton, and I propose to use experiments and theory to test the effects of small increases in temperature on the effect of herbivores on plants. My research group will test the effects of warming on planktonic food webs, and use models to apply our experimental findings to large-scale natural systems that support fish production, carbon sequestration and biodiversity in the world's oceans. My group's research will produce evidence and models that will directly inform projections of how climate change affects ecosystems. This kind of information represents a frontier of science, and was lacking in the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative body of climate change science and impacts. Our work will therefore contribute to a broader understanding of ecological systems now and in the future.