Ecosytem functionning at the crossroad of biogeography and community ecology

生态学家一直对生物多样性的空间分布着迷。温度在大的生物地理梯度上直接影响许多生态系统过程，因为它影响生物速率。气候也是许多物种范围和生态互动的重要驱动因素。然而，在这些事实之间的十字路口发现了一个基本的、仍然没有得到回答的问题：生物多样性的分布和正在发生的群落生态在多大程度上影响着生态系统功能的全球分布？我的研究计划的长期目标是发展理论，以了解和预测生物多样性分布和生态系统在生物地理空间尺度上的功能。更具体地说，我将研究这样一个假设，即生态相互作用结构的空间变化在生物地理尺度上制约着生态系统生产力，与温度对生物速率的直接影响协同作用。我的具体目标是：i)发展一种数学形式来表示元生态系统相互作用网络的结构；ii)通过对其维度的分析来综合元生态系统的复杂性；iii)形式化并检验营养调节的温度依赖性的定量理论。

Ecologists have always been fascinated by the spatial distribution of biodiversity. Temperature impacts directly many ecosystem processes over large biogeographical gradients because it affects biological rates. Climate is also an essential driver of many species ranges and ecological interactions. At the crossroad between these facts is however found a fundamental, and still unanswered, question: to what extent the distribution of biodiversity, and the community ecology taking place, is influencing the global distribution of ecosystem functioning? The long-term objective of my research program is to develop theory to understand and predict biodiversity distribution and ecosystem functioning at biogeographical spatial scales. More specifically, I will investigate the hypothesis that the spatial variation of the architecture of ecological interactions is constraining ecosystem productivity at the biogeographical scale, in synergy with the direct effect of temperature on biological rates. My specific objectives are: i) develop a mathematical formalism to represent the architecture of metaecosystem interaction networks; ii) synthesize the complexity of metaecosystems with analysis of their dimensionality; iii) formalize and test quantitative theory of temperature-dependence of trophic regulation.