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: 0623874
• 负责人: J. Emmett Duffy
• 金额: $ 45.59万
• 依托单位: College of William & Mary Virginia Institute of Marine Science
• 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=0623874&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幅度和速度的变化。同时气候变暖，富营养化，过度捕获和异国情调的入侵迫切需要了解压力源的相互作用。在全球变化的许多这样的方面中，最不可逆转的是生物多样性的灭绝。因此，了解改变生物多样性如何介导生态系统过程是基本生态学和对全球变化对生态系统及其对人类提供的服务的影响的实际预测。特别是，不断变化的社区组成的影响通常是通过营养互动来介导的，这使得食品网络生态学与BDEF研究成为理解复杂自然生态系统动态的重要边界。越过这个边界将需要将长期时间序列数据整合在多营养社区，社区互动的实验分析以及新的动态建模方法。这项研究基于切萨皮克湾鳗草（Zostera Marina）生态系统的十年研究，以解决这一目标。拟议的研究汇集了一名实验生态学家和一名生物学家，采用了互补的实验套件，分析了跨三个营养水平（迄今为止八年的每月抽样）持续长期监测数据的分析，以及仿真建模，以构建和参数化动态食品切萨皮克湾鳗草社区的网络模型。这项研究将建立Chesapeake Seagrass Food Web作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，从而促进其用作探索这两种通用问题的模型系统的使用并应用生态学。这项研究的更广泛影响包括：（1）在多个级别的大量学生以及K-12老师的实地研究经验，（2）与长期运行的水质监测计划的补充整合，以进行水质，淹没植被和淹没鱼类组合和（3）有价值的长期基线数据，可评估和预测对经济重要的河口生态系统的影响，以造成气候变暖，捕鱼压力，富营养化和其他压力源的变化。