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

我们的社会依赖于生态系统产生的商品和服务。其中包括碳固存、植物生长和海产品生产。科学家们今天面临的一个主要挑战是理解为什么这些功能因地而异，并预测它们在未来如何随着气候变化而变化。虽然生态系统是高度复杂的，而且理解这种复杂性很重要，但在我的研究中，我采取的方法是，我们可以通过关注环境温度对生态过程的速率和结果的非常简单的一般影响来理解大量的生态变化。环境温度以一般的方式影响基本的生物过程。我们可以利用温度的这种普遍效应来预测复杂的生态系统如何对温度的环境变化做出反应，如季节、纬度或全球气候变化。有证据表明，变暖加强了食草动物对植物的影响，无论食草动物是昆虫、鱼类还是浮游动物，我建议用实验和理论来测试温度的小幅升高对食草动物对植物的影响的影响。我的研究小组将测试变暖对浮游食物网的影响，并使用模型将我们的实验结果应用于支持渔业生产、碳封存和世界海洋生物多样性的大规模自然系统。我们小组的研究将产生证据和模型，直接为气候变化如何影响生态系统的预测提供信息。这类信息代表了科学的前沿，而在政府间气候变化专门委员会（IPCC）——气候变化科学及其影响的权威机构——的最新报告中却缺乏这类信息。因此，我们的工作将有助于现在和将来对生态系统有更广泛的了解。

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 thesefunctions 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 researchI take the approach that we can understand a substantial amount of ecological change by focusing on verysimple, 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 generaleffect of temperature to project how complex ecological systems respond to environmental variation intemperature, as occurs with season, latitude or global climate change. Evidence suggests that warmingstrengthens the impacts of herbivores on plants, whether the herbivores are insects or fish or zooplankton, and Ipropose to use experiments and theory to test the effects of small increases in temperature on the effect ofherbivores on plants. My research group will test the effects of warming on planktonic food webs, and usemodels to apply our experimental findings to large-scale natural systems that support fishproduction, 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 climatechange affects ecosystems. This kind of information represents a frontier of science, and was lacking in themost recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the authoritative body of climatechange science and impacts. Our work will therefore contribute to a broader understanding of ecologicalsystems now and in the future.