Coexistence in a Changing Environment

在不断变化的环境中共存

• 批准号: 0614068
• 负责人: Peter Adler
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Utah State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-09-01 至 2010-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0614068&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Coexistence; Changing; Environment

Climate change poses an increasingly important threat to biodiversity. Much research has focused on how increasing mean temperatures will affect ecological communities, but climate change is also predicted to cause an increase in precipitation variability. Although theory shows that climate variability can have important effects on the coexistence of competing species, a lack of appropriate data has prevented rigorous tests of this theory. The research proposed here takes advantage of unique historical datasets to test the influence of climate variability on coexistence in semiarid ecosystems of the western U.S. During the early and mid-20th century, ecologists at a number of field stations made annual maps of all individual plants species in small plots. This project involves digitizing these original maps and then using statistical analyses and computer models to test whether climate variability promotes or reduces species diversity.Results from this research will quantify the role of climate variability in maintaining biodiversity in five widespread and economically important rangeland ecosystems. These results will provide an important test of general ecological theory as well as a first step towards forecasting the ecological effects of predicted increases in climate variability. Digitally archiving the historical data represents an equally important contribution, since it will give the entire scientific community an unparalleled opportunity to learn about the future by studying the past.

气候变化对生物多样性构成越来越重要的威胁。许多研究都集中在平均气温上升将如何影响生态群落上，但气候变化预计也会导致降水变率增加。尽管理论表明气候变化会对竞争物种的共存产生重要影响，但缺乏适当的数据阻碍了对该理论的严格测试。这里提出的研究利用独特的历史数据集来测试气候变化对美国西部半干旱生态系统共存的影响。在 20 世纪早期和中期，许多野外站的生态学家制作了所有单个植物物种的年度地图在小块土地上。该项目包括将这些原始地图数字化，然后使用统计分析和计算机模型来测试气候变化是否促进或减少物种多样性。这项研究的结果将量化气候变化在维持五个广泛且具有经济重要性的牧场生态系统中的生物多样性方面的作用。这些结果将为一般生态理论提供重要的检验，并为预测气候变化预测增加的生态影响迈出第一步。对历史数据进行数字化存档也是一项同样重要的贡献，因为它将为整个科学界提供无与伦比的机会，通过研究过去来了解未来。