Exploring interactions among climatic stressors and adaptive freshwater metacommunities

全球变化的生态惊喜证明了缺乏一种概念性方法来研究多种新的和快速的环境变化（即压力源）的累积影响。压力源和物种之间的相互作用是这些意外事件的核心，因为它们会导致间接影响，而这些间接影响无法根据单一直接影响的知识轻易预测。然而，对非生物和生物（如竞争、捕食）相互作用、物种扩散和适应对应激群落的中介作用的机制理解仍然非常有限。生态位和元群落概念的整合为发现涉及多种压力源（如极端气候事件（如干旱和热浪））的生态进化动力学提供了工具。在这种方法中还必须考虑功能性物种特征，以便能够预测气候压力源对生态系统功能及其服务的净影响。我的建议的前提是，沿着海拔和纬度梯度探索池塘元群落可以揭示全球变暖如何影响生物多样性和功能性能。我的年轻科学家小组的几项发现是这项拟议研究的基础，这将建立在我们的经验优势上，以调查多种压力源对水生生态系统的净影响。我们将在未来五年内完成以下四个研究目标：

The ecological surprises of global change attest to the lack of a conceptual approach to the study of cumulative impacts by multiple novel and rapid environmental changes (i.e. stressors). Interactions among stressors and species are at the core of these unexpected events as they result in indirect effects that cannot be easily predicted based on knowledge of single direct effects. However, mechanistic understanding of the mediating effects of abiotic and biotic (e.g., competition, predation) interactions, species dispersal, and adaptation on stressed communities remains very limited. Integration of the evolving niche and metacommunity concepts provides a tool for discovering eco-evolutionary dynamics involving multiple stressors, such as extreme climatic events (e.g., drought and heat waves). Functional species traits must also be considered in such an approach to enable forecasting of the net impacts of climatic stressors on ecosystem function and their services. The premise of my proposal is that exploring pond metacommunities along altitudinal and latitudinal gradients can reveal how global warming affects biodiversity and functional performance. Several discoveries by my group of young scientists are the basis for this proposed research, which will build on our empirical strength to investigate the net effects of multiple stressors on aquatic ecosystems. We will address these four research objectives over the next five years: