COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Biocomplexity and Environmental Change in a Vegetated Estuarine Ecosystem

合作研究：河口植被生态系统的生物复杂性和环境变化

• 批准号: 0623224
• 负责人: Sebastian Schreiber
• 金额: $ 2.54万
• 依托单位: College of William and Mary
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-01-01 至 2009-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0623224&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: COLLABORATIVE; RESEARCH; Biocomplexity; Environmental; Change

Ecosystems worldwide are undergoing changes of unprecedented magnitude and speed as a result of human influence. Simultaneous climate warming, eutrophication, overfishing, and exotic invasions create an urgent need to understand how stressors interact. Of the many such facets of global change, the most irreversible is extinction of biodiversity. Thus, understanding how changing biodiversity mediates ecosystem processes is central to both basic ecology and to practical prediction of global change impacts on ecosystems and the services they provide to humanity. In particular, effects of changing community composition are often mediated through trophic interactions, making the integration of food web ecology into BDEF research an important frontier in understanding the dynamics of complex natural ecosystems. Crossing this frontier will require integration of long-term time series data on multitrophic communities, experimental analyses of community interactions, and new dynamic modeling approaches. This research builds on a decade of research in a Chesapeake Bay eelgrass (Zostera marina) ecosystem to address this goal. The proposed research brings together an experimental ecologist and a biomathematician, employing a complementary suite of experiments, analyses of continuing longterm monitoring data across three trophic levels (eight years of monthly sampling to date), and simulation modeling, to construct and parameterize a dynamic food web model of a Chesapeake Bay eelgrass community. This research will establish the Chesapeake seagrass food web as one of a small number of ecological systems in which the requisite field data and experimental characterization of interaction strengths are available for such dynamic modeling, facilitating its use as a model system for exploring problems in both general and applied ecology. Broader impacts of this research include: (1) field research experiences for a large number of students at several levels, as well as K-12 teachers, (2) complementary integration with long-running monitoring programs for water quality, submerged vegetation, and fish assemblages, and (3) valuable long-term baseline data with which to evaluate and forecast effects on economically important estuarine ecosystems of climate warming, changes in fishing pressure, eutrophication, and other stressors.

由于人类的影响，全世界的生态系统正在经历前所未有的规模和速度的变化。气候变暖、富营养化、过度捕捞和外来入侵同时发生，迫切需要了解压力源如何相互作用。在全球变化的诸多方面中，最不可逆转的是生物多样性的灭绝。因此，了解不断变化的生物多样性如何调节生态系统过程对于基础生态学和全球变化对生态系统及其为人类提供的服务影响的实际预测至关重要。特别是，群落组成变化的影响通常是通过营养相互作用来调节的，这使得将食物网生态学纳入 BDEF 研究成为理解复杂自然生态系统动态的重要前沿。跨越这一前沿需要整合多营养群落的长期时间序列数据、群落相互作用的实验分析以及新的动态建模方法。这项研究建立在切萨皮克湾大叶藻（Zostera marina）生态系统十年研究的基础上，旨在实现这一目标。拟议的研究汇集了一名实验生态学家和一名生物数学家，采用一套互补的实验，分析三个营养级别的持续长期监测数据（迄今为止的八年每月采样）和模拟建模，以构建和参数化动态食物切萨皮克湾鳗草群落的网络模型。这项研究将把切萨皮克海草食物网建立为少数生态系统之一，其中必要的现场数据和相互作用强度的实验表征可用于这种动态建模，从而促进其作为模型系统来探索一般问题和应用生态学。这项研究的更广泛影响包括：(1) 为多个级别的大量学生以及 K-12 教师提供实地研究经验，(2) 与长期运行的水质、水下植被和环境监测项目相辅相成。 (3) 有价值的长期基线数据，用于评估和预测气候变暖、捕捞压力变化、富营养化和其他压力因素对具有重要经济意义的河口生态系统的影响。