Bioenergetic approaches for understanding and forecasting ecological and epidemiological impacts of climate change

气候变化、土地利用变化和其他大规模干扰正在加速改变全球生态系统。需要能够概述未来影响的范围、时间轴和方式的生态预测模型，以便能够在保护濒危物种和控制疾病等方面采取积极主动的管理战略。然而，与气候科学不同，机械模型通常用于预测气候变化，生态学尚未提供预测生态系统对这些变化的反应的综合框架。该提案整合了生理学、生态学和流行病学原理，以开发、测试和应用机械模型，用于理解和预测气候变化在保护和公共/野生动物健康两个关键领域的影响。 首先，我们为北极熊和北极海洋食物网开发气候变化影响模型。通过将能源作为连接生态系统过程的共同货币，这些模型明确地解释了气候变化破坏系统的机制，从海洋生产力的变化到海冰损失、北极熊食物压力和北极熊数量下降之间的联系。这些模型将为塑造这一食物网的动态过程提供前所未有的理解，并最终将用于为全世界的北极熊种群进行风险评估。特别是，我们的研究将提供工具和分析，以更新加拿大最新的北极熊状况评估，该评估没有考虑到气候变化的影响，因此导致过于乐观的评估和可能不可持续的管理策略。 其次，也使用生物能量方法，我们开发了一个机制框架，用于理解和预测气候变化对寄生虫病的影响，包括寄生虫地理范围的变化以及对野生动物，牲畜和人类宿主的健康后果。通过建立和利用寄生虫温度敏感性的系统模式，该方法将允许在全球范围内进行疾病预测和积极的疾病预防计划，即使是对研究不足的寄生虫物种。作为一个例子，我们将应用我们的框架来了解气候变化在加拿大北极地区最近寄生虫范围扩张中的作用，并评估未来疾病传播的风险和对驯鹿和麝牛的健康后果，从而也有助于保护这些物种和依赖健康人群的北方人的粮食安全。 从长远来看，生物能量方法的普遍性将使我的小组能够将本提案的概念应用于其他物种和与保护和公共卫生问题有关的各种全球变化，例如土地利用变化、污染和入侵物种的生态和流行病学后果。

Climate change, land use change, and other large-scale disturbances are altering ecosystems globally at an accelerating rate. Ecological forecast models that can outline the scope, timeline and manner of future impacts are needed to allow for proactive management strategies, for example, in the conservation of endangered species and the control of diseases. However, unlike the climate sciences, where mechanistic models are routinely used to predict climate changes, ecology does not yet offer a comprehensive framework for predicting ecosystem response to these changes. This proposal integrates physiological, ecological and epidemiological principles to develop, test, and apply mechanistic models for understanding and forecasting climate change impacts in two key areas of conservation and public/wildlife health. First, we develop climate change impact models for polar bears and the Arctic marine food web. By focusing on energy as the common currency linking ecosystem processes, these models explicitly account for the mechanisms by which climate change disrupts the system, from changes in marine productivity to the links between sea ice loss, polar bear food stress, and polar bear population declines. The models will provide an unprecedented understanding of the dynamic processes shaping this food web, and will ultimately be used to develop risk assessments for polar bear populations worldwide. In particular, our research will provide the tools and analyses to update the latest Canadian status assessment of polar bears, which did not account for climate change impacts and thus resulted in overly optimistic assessments and likely unsustainable management strategies. Second, also using a bioenergetic approach, we develop a mechanistic framework for understanding and forecasting climate change impacts on parasitic diseases, including, for example, changes to the geographic ranges of parasites and the health consequences for wildlife, livestock, and human hosts. By establishing and leveraging systematic patterns on the temperature-sensitivity of parasites, the approach will allow for disease forecasts and proactive disease prevention programs worldwide, even for poorly studied parasite species. As one example, we will apply our framework to understand the role of climate change in recent parasite range expansions in the Canadian Arctic and evaluate the risk of future disease spread and health consequences for caribou and muskoxen, thus also contributing to the conservation of these species and the food security of Northerners who depend on healthy populations. In the long-term, the generality of the bioenergetic approach will allow my group to apply the concepts of this proposal to other species and diverse global change related conservation and public health issues, such as the ecological and epidemiological consequences of land use change, pollution, and invasive species.