MOVING SPECIES: MODELLING SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL RESPONSES TO ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE

移动物种：模拟环境变化的时空响应

• 批准号: RGPIN-2015-06602
• 负责人: Davies, Thomas
• 金额: $ 2.91万
• 依托单位: University of British Columbia
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2019-01-01 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=687878
• 关键词: MOVING; SPECIES; MODELLING; SPATIAL; TEMPORAL

The world around us is changing rapidly. Natural habitats are shrinking in size and increasing in isolation, the climate is warming, and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. Many of these changes have negative impacts on biodiversity-the plants and animals with which we share the planet. Recent research has documented how species have responded to recent changes in climate. For example, species are shifting their distributions to higher elevations and latitudes where temperatures are cooler, and plants are flowering earlier in the year as the growing season lengthens and spring moves forward. However, we still lack robust models for predicting species' future responses and the impacts of biodiversity change on the ecosystem processes critical for sustaining life on Earth, such as nutrient cycling, water purification and, at larger spatial scales, climate regulation. This proposal attempts to address this challenge. First, I will synthesise global databases on plant distributions and phenology (the timing of periodic life history events) to examine the variation in species' response to recent anthropogenic climate warming. I will then attempt to model this variation taking into account species differences as well as the interactions between species to generate a unified framework that brings together both responses in space and time. Second, I will explore the links between the structure of communities and their ecological function. There is growing evidence that more diverse communities tend to be more productive and more stable through time. However, it is not just the total number of species that is important, but also their complementarity to one another. Phylogeny-the evolutionary tree-of-life-provides one measure of species similarity as theory predicts that more closely related species will be more ecologically similar, and thus may provide a better index of species complementarity. Here, I will use information on the plant tree-of-life to characterise the relationship between productivity and the phylogenetic structure of forest tree communities across North America. I will then use algorithms that reconstruct species distributions from climate data to predict the likely composition of future forest communities using climate projections. By describing the likely structure of future communities, this work allows us to speculate on possible changes in ecosystem functioning under climate change. My aim is to improve our ability to predict not only species' futures, but also the functional properties of future ecosystems.

我们周围的世界正在迅速变化。自然栖息地的面积正在缩小，而孤立的面积却在增加，气候正在变暖，极端天气事件变得更加频繁。其中许多变化对生物多样性（与我们共享地球的植物和动物）产生负面影响。最近的研究记录了物种如何应对最近的气候变化。例如，物种正在将其分布转移到气温较低的高海拔和高纬度地区，并且随着生长季节的延长和春季的提前，植物的开花时间也会提前。然而，我们仍然缺乏强大的模型来预测物种的未来反应以及生物多样性变化对维持地球生命至关重要的生态系统过程的影响，例如养分循环、水净化以及更大空间尺度的气候调节。该提案试图解决这一挑战。首先，我将综合有关植物分布和物候（周期性生命史事件的时间）的全球数据库，以研究物种对最近人为气候变暖的反应的变化。然后，我将尝试对这种变化进行建模，考虑物种差异以及物种之间的相互作用，以生成一个统一的框架，将空间和时间的响应结合在一起。其次，我将探讨群落结构与其生态功能之间的联系。越来越多的证据表明，随着时间的推移，更加多元化的社区往往会更加富有成效、更加稳定。然而，重要的不仅仅是物种总数，还有它们之间的互补性。系统发育——进化的生命之树——提供了物种相似性的一种衡量标准，因为理论预测，相关性越密切的物种在生态上就越相似，因此可以提供更好的物种互补性指数。在这里，我将利用植物生命之树的信息来描述北美各地森林树木群落的生产力与系统发育结构之间的关系。然后，我将使用根据气候数据重建物种分布的算法，通过气候预测来预测未来森林群落的可能组成。通过描述未来社区的可能结构，这项工作使我们能够推测气候变化下生态系统功能可能发生的变化。我的目标是提高我们预测物种未来和未来生态系统功能特性的能力。