Predicting climate and land use change impacts on pollinators across landscapes to continents

人类活动造成了无处不在的环境变化，加速了全球和加拿大的灭绝速度。导致物种丧失的关键因素--可能会降低生态系统提供的服务--包括许多众所周知的威胁，如栖息地丧失，以及新出现的威胁，如气候变化。这种全球变化的影响是广泛的，但我们在理解上的巨大差距限制了目前预测未来生物多样性变化的能力。这项研究计划寻求，作为其长期目标，了解有助于物种多样性的空间和时间变化的过程。我们最近的发现表明，一些最重要的传粉者群体--大黄蜂--近几十年来与历史基线条件相比出现了巨大的范围损失，这可能是气候变化的结果。这些物种对气候变化的不同寻常的敏感性与它们在历史上占据的最热地区对变暖的相对容忍程度上的生态位保守主义有关。这项工作揭示了意想不到的总体趋势，但也表明物种之间随着时间的推移在其范围内存在着非常大的差异。什么特征可能决定了为什么一些物种，无论是大黄蜂还是蝴蝶，在巨大的环境变化下仍然成功，而其他物种却急剧衰落？这项提议试图确定可能有助于回答这个问题的关键特征，并首次测试土地利用变化与气候变化对北美和欧洲大黄蜂物种分布的相对影响。后一个项目包括国际合作，它将提供特别独特的培训机会。将解释个体物种特征对射程变化的影响的模型与其他测量物种组合内部和物种之间特征如何在空间尺度上变化的模型结合在一起，构成了本提案中第三个主要项目的基础。我们将把重点放在这个项目的蝴蝶上，并包括在安大略省和魁北克省的广泛实地工作。这项提议旨在通过展示物种间的扩散速度等关键特征的差异如何影响群落从当地栖息地到区域的结构，从而使研究计划更接近其长期目标。这项工作的结果，与我们最近的发现一样，将被用来为加拿大和国际上的政策进程提供信息。

Human activities have created pervasive environmental changes that have accelerated extinction rates globally and in Canada. The critical factors that contribute to the loss of species - and that may degrade the services that ecosystems provide - include many well-known threats, such as habitat losses, and emerging threats, like climate change. The impacts of such global changes are widespread but enormous gaps in our understanding limit current capacities to predict future biodiversity changes. This research program seeks, as its long term objective, to understand the processes that contribute to spatial and temporal variation in species diversity. Our recent discoveries show that some of the most important pollinator groups - the bumblebees - have shown massive range losses over recent decades relative to historical baseline conditions, effects that may be a consequence of climate changes. The unusual susceptibility of these species to climate change relates to niche conservatism in their relative tolerance of warming in the hottest areas they historically occupied. This work revealed unexpected and general trends, but also showed that there is very substantial variation among species in their ranges through time. What traits might determine why some species, whether bumblebees or butterflies, succeed despite massive environmental changes, while other species decline precipitously? This proposal seeks to identify key traits that may help answer this question and to test, for the first time, the relative impacts of land use changes versus climate changes on the distributions of bumblebee species across North America and Europe. The latter project includes international collaboration that will offer particularly distinct training opportunities. Bringing together models that account for the effects of individual species' characteristics on range shifts with other models that measure how traits vary within and among species assemblages across spatial scales forms the basis of a third major project in this proposal. We will focus on butterflies for this project and include extensive field work in Ontario and Quebec. This proposal is intended to move the research program closer to its long term objective by showing how variation in critical traits, like dispersal rates, among species can affect how communities are structured from local habitats to regions. The results of this work, as with our recent discoveries, will be used to inform policy processes in Canada and internationally.