Applying the metabolic theory of ecology to estimate the productivity of inland fish communities

自1868年以来，加拿大联邦政府一直支持环境立法，以保护鱼类及其栖息地。2012年，修订后的《渔业法》措辞将立法从保护鱼类栖息地转向保护渔业生产力。该法现在要求拟议的发展项目量化并抵消对生产力的潜在影响。量化发展的影响仍然是一项挑战，并为工业界、政府和学术界开发明确将生产力与生境和抵消做法联系起来的工具提供了机会。同时，还需要考虑到气候变化对渔业资源日益增加的影响。21世纪初提出的新陈代谢生态学理论(MTE)是解决这些需求的一个有前途的框架。它的方程可以主要使用群落成员的身体大小和温度来估计重要的生态参数，如种群增长率和种间相互作用。虽然该框架的目的是纯粹用于基础科学，但在过去十年中，它已越来越多地被纳入自然资源的应用管理，特别是在监测海洋渔业方面。然而，它还没有被轻易地应用于景观(例如，管理一组内陆湖泊)或作为一种预测工具来估计水生栖息地的鱼类生产力。该提案解决了这一挑战，并以MTE为框架，解决了一些基本的生态问题，即人类活动、气候变化、栖息地质量和群落组成如何影响加拿大湖泊和河流的身体大小、种群增长率和整体鱼类生产力。这项建议汇集了学术界、工业界和政府的科学和管理专业知识，以确保开发的模型既适用于加拿大的监管格局，也有助于解决渔业、水产科学、新陈代谢生态学和空间生态学领域的重要问题。

Since 1868 the federal government of Canada has upheld environmental legislation to protect fish and their habitats. In 2012, revised wording of the Fisheries Act shifted legislation from the protection of fish habitat to the protection of fisheries productivity. The Act now requires that proposed development projects quantify and offset potential impacts on productivity. Quantifying the impacts of development remains a challenge and presents an opportunity for industry, government, and academia to develop tools that explicitly link productivity to habitat and offsetting practices. Concurrently, there is a need to account for the mounting impacts of climate change on fisheries resources. The Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE), proposed in the early 2000s, is a promising framework to address these needs. Its equations can estimate ecologically important parameters such as population growth rates and interspecific interactions using mainly the body sizes of members of a community and temperature. While the framework was intended to be used purely for basic science, over the last decade it has been increasingly incorporated in applied management of natural resources, especially in the context of monitoring ocean fisheries. However, it has not been applied as readily across landscapes (e.g. management of a group of inland lakes) or as a predictive tool to estimate the fish productivity of aquatic habitats. This proposal addresses this challenge and uses MTE as a framework to address some fundamental ecological questions on how human activities, climate change, habitat quality, and community composition influence body size, population growth rates, and overall fish productivity in Canada's lakes and rivers. This proposal gathers scientific and management expertise from across academia, industry and government to ensure that the models developed have both applied relevance to Canada's regulatory landscape, as well as contribute to important questions within the fields of the Fisheries, Aquatic Sciences, the Metabolic Theory of Ecology and Spatial Ecology.