Interactions between sources of environmental change: How do resource quality and coloured environments drive multi-trophic eco-evolutionary dynamics?

环境变化来源之间的相互作用：资源质量和彩色环境如何驱动多营养生态进化动态？

基本信息

批准号：
NE/N00213X/1
负责人：
Steven Sait
金额：
$ 49.19万
依托单位：
University of Leeds
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2015
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2015 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FN00213X%2F1
关键词：
Interactions between sources environmental change

项目摘要

Environmental variation is in all natural ecosystems. Understanding how it affects individuals within a species, changes their population size and interactions between species is the bedrock of ecology. Seasonal patterns in weather, periods of drought or flooding and large-scale regional climate changes, such as El Niño, are examples of environmental variation across the world. Given the future impacts of climate change on biodiversity, this fundamental ecological process is now an incredibly important and urgent issue for scientists and society. Recent climate warming has resulted in a range of species responses, such as latitudinal and altitudinal shifts in the geographic distribution of populations and changes in the timing of key life cycle events, which may increase extinction risks. For example, El Niño events are increasing in frequency, which will have a dramatic impact on biodiversity across large regions of the world. These changes in environmental variation will affect our ability to predict how species and their interactions will respond to climate change, with important implications for the management of natural populations, such as fisheries and biological pest control.Changes in environmental conditions can be thought of in a similar way to the different colours in the visible light spectrum. Rapid environmental changes dominate in "blue" environments (short wavelengths are most important in blue light); slow changes dominate in "red" environments (long wavelengths are most important in red light); "white" environments are random; an equal mixture of fast and slow changes. We will focus on how species respond to two sources of environmental variation that may interact with each other; fluctuations in temperature (specifically the colour of those fluctuations), a key driver of species' responses to climate change, and variation in food quality, which is a measure of environmental degradation. We will study the impact of these environmental changes on the relationship between an insect and a parasitic wasp in lab experiments. The insect is a pest around the world, so we will learn about how pest species will respond to climate change. Parasitic wasps are a highly diverse group of organisms that play a crucial role in ecological communities and in regulating insect crop pests. As well as informing us about how predators and prey respond to environmental variation generally, we will learn whether this might lead to more pest problems in the future. Laboratory systems have been used to answer questions in ecology and evolution that are extremely difficult to address in the field. When combined with mathematical models, as we propose to do, they have greatly improved our understanding of invasion, biological control and harvesting.The theory underlying the impact of environmental variation on biodiversity has received considerable attention recently, but we will develop this theory to more accurately reflect the biology of many species. Some species only reproduce once a year (the focus of previous theory), but many others reproduce continuously throughout the year (the focus of this study), facing constantly changing conditions within and across seasons. We are also interested in whether environmental change will affect important traits of species, such as how long they take to develop or if their body size changes, and how those changes affect their abundance. To fully understand these continuously reproducing populations that may be adapting to environmental change, we have to develop new mathematical approaches. We will develop the theory of environmental variation and link this to our laboratory system. We will study whether environmental variation causes potentially unexpected patterns in population size and whether it will change the risk of species going extinct. The novel experiments will test how well the models work, improving them by updating them with the new information from the experiments.

环境变化均在所有自然生态系统中。了解它如何影响一个物种中的个体，改变其种群的规模和物种之间的相互作用是生态学的基石。天气中的季节性模式，干旱或洪水时期以及大规模的区域气候变化，例如厄尔尼诺现象，是世界各地环境变化的例子。鉴于气候变化对生物多样性的未来影响，对于科学家和社会来说，这一基本生态过程现在是一个越来越重要且紧迫的问题。最近的气候变暖导致了一系列物种反应，例如人口地理分布的纬度和高度变化以及关键生命周期事件时机的变化，这可能会增加扩展风险。例如，厄尔尼诺事件的频率正在增加，这将对世界上大型地区的生物多样性产生巨大影响。环境变化的这些变化将影响我们预测物种及其相互作用将如何应对气候变化的能力，这对自然种群的管理具有重要意义，例如渔业和生物害虫控制。环境条件下的变化可以与可见光光谱中的不同颜色相似。快速的环境变化在“蓝色”环境中占主导地位（短波长在蓝光中最重要）；缓慢的变化在“红色”环境中占主导地位（长波长在红光下最重要）； “白色”环境是随机的；快速变化的相等混合物。我们将专注于物种如何应对可能相互作用的两个环境变化来源。温度的波动（特别是这些波动的颜色），这是物种对气候变化反应的关键驱动力以及食物质量的变化，这是环境退化的量度。我们将研究这些环境变化对实验实验中绝缘与寄生黄蜂之间关系的影响。隔热材料是世界各地的害虫，因此我们将了解害虫物种将如何应对气候变化。寄生黄蜂是一个高度多样化的组织，在生态社区和控制隔热作物害虫中发挥着至关重要的作用。除了通知我们有关捕食者和猎物如何对环境变化的反应方式，我们还将了解这是否可能导致未来的害虫问题。实验室系统已被用来回答在现场难以解决的生态和进化问题。正如我们建议这样做的那样，当与数学模型结合使用时，它们已大大提高了我们对入侵，生物控制和收获的理解。最近，环境变化对生物多样性的影响的理论最近受到了考虑的关注，但是我们将发展这一理论以更准确地反映许多物种的生物学。有些物种每年仅繁殖一次（以前的理论的重点），但是许多其他物种在一年中不断繁殖（本研究的重点），面临整个季节内部和整个季节的不断变化。我们还对环境变化是否会影响物种的重要特征，例如它们需要多长时间发展，体积是否变化以及这些变化如何影响其丰度。为了充分理解可能适应环境变化的不断再现种群，我们必须开发新的数学方法。我们将发展环境差异理论，并将其与我们的实验室系统联系起来。我们将研究环境变化是否会导致人口规模的潜在意外模式，以及它是否会改变物种灭绝的风险。新颖的实验将测试模型的运作效果，并通过通过实验中的新信息对其进行改进。