Download or read book Temperature Effects on Consumer resource Species Interactions written by Lauren Elizabeth Culler and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is altering the thermal environment for populations at all trophic levels and thus the response of any given population to warming can only be understood in the context of species interactions. Consumer-resource species interactions (e.g., predator-prey, plant-herbivore) are a ubiquitous and fundamental unit of ecological systems and determine much of the flux of energy through communities and ecosystems. In the research presented here, I integrate theories, knowledge, and techniques from thermal physiology into a community context to test how climate warming shapes consumer-resource species interactions. Given the magnitude of thermal changes occurring globally, integrating multiple fields is required for adequately testing and predicting ecological response to climate change. Temperature effects consumer-resource interactions via changes to the phenology of the interacting species and rates involved with the interaction, e.g., predation rate. Using an Arctic aquatic insect predator-prey system, I tested how temperature shaped phenology and interaction rates and evaluated the combined effects on prey population dynamics. In contrast to previous studies, warming had positive effects on prey survival. Although warming increased prey mortality from predation, prey developed more quickly and were exposed to predators for fewer days, thus increasing their probability of survival. Temperature affects several physiological and behavioral processes of consumer-resource interactions. These same processes are also shaped by other factors such as predation risk. I tested how temperature and predation risk affected digestive physiology and growth rates of a predaceous damselfly. Results indicated that temperature strongly shaped consumption, metabolic, and growth rates but these effects were modified by predation risk such that warming-induced increases in consumer performance were reduced. Last, I used a long-term temperature dataset from a northern NH watershed to show that freshwaters, while sensitive to changes in air temperature, may also buffer some degree of air temperature change. Given the rapidly increasing global air temperatures and the temperature effects on freshwater ecological dynamics that were measured in the first two projects, understanding how water temperatures change as air temperatures change is imperative for predicting the effects of climate change on freshwaters as a human-natural couple system.

Download or read book Effects of Temperature on Species Interactions in Northern Hardwood Forests written by Nina Katherine Lany and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A long-standing focus of ecology is to understand how abiotic factors as well as species interactions shape food web structure. This topic has increasing societal relevance as global temperatures increase. In this research, I performed field tests of three main hypothesis of the effects of temperature on the physiology and phenology of interacting species: 1) that the effect of temperature on the body velocity of predators will have the greatest effect on consumer-resource interactions, 2) that temperature-driven variation in nutrient content can cause the synchronous fluctuations of a diverse community of primary consumers, and 3) that changes in temperature can decouple the phenological synchrony of predator and prey. These studies generally supported predictions that arise from the general effects of temperature on biological rates, with some important qualifications. I found that the effects of temperature on the body velocity of predators measured in the field had an effect on consumer-resource interactions consistent with theoretical models of the temperature sensitivity of predator-prey interactions. Consistent with predictions from ecological stoichiometry, the nitrogen content of leaves was typically reduced at higher temperatures, and this reduction in nutrient content had strong effects on the abundance of primary consumers. However, this thesis revealed additional important factors that should be considered when evaluating the effects of temperature on species interactions. Heterogeneity of mortality risk, for example due to habitat structure and patchiness of predators, lessened top-down control and could prevent the total suppression of prey at warmer temperatures predicted by theoretical models. Species diversity was also important in buffering the potentially negative effects of increased temperatures on food webs. Variation among host species in the nutrient content of leaves lessened fluctuations in aggregate biomass of herbivores, increasing the stability of abundance of primary consumers. A diverse prey base also buffered against a phenological mismatch in the timing of breeding of a migratory songbird and peak food availability for their young.

Download or read book Temperature Effects on Consumer resource Interactions written by Joana Neto Cerejeira and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book How Interplay Between Positive and Negative Feedback Influences the Persistence of Consumer resource and Mutualistic Interactions written by Christopher Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigating the mechanisms by which species persist within complex ecological communities and in variable environments is critical for understanding how biodiversity is maintained in the face of perturbations in the biotic (e.g., invasive species) and abiotic (e.g., climate change) environment. Persistence arises from the interplay between species interactions (e.g., consumer-resource, mutualism, competition) and species' responses to environmental variability. My objectives are to investigate the mechanisms promoting the persistence of consumer-resource (e.g., predator-prey) and mutualistic (e.g., plant-pollinator) interactions and to understand how species respond to environmental variation. From a theoretical perspective, I develop conceptual frameworks to investigate how tension between stabilizing negative feedback and destabilizing positive feedback affects the persistence of (i) consumer-resource and (ii) mutualistic interactions. (i) The stability of consumer-resource interactions arises from the tension between within-species interactions inducing negative feedback (e.g., resource self-limitation due to intraspecific competition) and between-species interactions inducing positive feedback (e.g., consumer overcompensation due to saturating functional responses). I derive an empirically quantifiable metric that incorporates positive and negative feedback effects, and thus, the net effect of within- and between-species interactions on a focal species' per capita growth rate. (ii) Mutualistic interactions are characterized by positive feedback that should make them extinction prone. Yet, mutualisms are widespread and persistent in nature. Empirical data suggests that competition for the benefits given by mutualistic partners may induce negative feedback. I develop a theoretical framework that incorporates competition for benefits within mutualistic interactions and find that competition for benefits alone promotes the assembly and persistence of mutualistic communities. Finally, I use a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches to investigate the population dynamics of the bordered plant bug (Largus californicus), a Hemipteran herbivore inhabiting the California coastal sage scrub. I find that both temperature and resource variation interact with development-induced delays in the operation of negative feedback to drive the observed dynamics. These frameworks yield testable predictions about the mechanisms promoting the persistence of consumer-resource and mutualistic interactions and the dynamics of species inhabiting variable environments. The results illustrate how considering positive and negative feedback effects offer key insights into the mechanisms underlying the generation and maintenance of biodiversity.

Download or read book Eco Evolutionary Dynamics written by and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2014-08-12 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theme of this volume is to discuss Eco-evolutionary Dynamics. Updates and informs the reader on the latest research findings Written by leading experts in the field Highlights areas for future investigation

Download or read book Food Webs written by John C. Moore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents new approaches to studying food webs, using practical and policy examples to demonstrate the theory behind ecosystem management decisions.

Download or read book Food Webs MPB 50 written by Kevin S. McCann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book synthesizes and reconciles modern and classical perspectives into a general unified theory.

Download or read book Bridging Environmental Physiology and Community Ecology written by Alison C. Iles and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most climate change predictions focus on the response of individual species to changing local conditions and ignore species interactions, largely due to the lack of a sound theoretical foundation for how interactions are expected to change with climate and how to incorporate them into climate change models. Much of the variability in species interaction strengths may be governed by fundamental constraints on physiological rates, possibly providing a framework for including species interactions into climate change models. Metabolic rates, ingestion rates and many other physiological rates are relatively predictable from body size and body temperature due to constraints imposed by the physical and chemical laws that govern fluid dynamics and the kinetics of biochemical reaction times. My dissertation assesses the usefulness of this framework by exploring the community-level consequences of physiological constraints. In Chapter 2, I incorporated temperature and body size scaling into the biological rate parameters of a series of realistically structured trophic network models. The relative magnitude of the temperature scaling parameters affecting consumer energetic costs (metabolic rates) and energetic gains (ingestion rates) determined how consumer energetic efficiency changed with temperature. I systematically changed consumer energetic efficiency and examined the sensitivity of network stability and species persistence to various temperatures. I found that a species' probability of extinction depended primarily on the effects of organismal physiology (body size and energetic efficiency with respect to temperature) and secondarily on the effects of local food web structure (trophic level and consumer generality). This suggests that physiology is highly influential on the structure and dynamics of ecological communities. If consumer energetic efficiency declined as temperature increased, that is, species did best at lower temperatures, then the simulated networks had greater stability at lower temperatures. The opposite scenario resulted in greater stability at higher temperatures. Thus, much of the community-level response depends on what species energetic efficiencies at the organismal-level really are, which formed the research question for Chapter 3: How does consumer energetic efficiency change with temperature? Existing evidence is scarce but suggestive of decreasing consumer energetic efficiency with increasing temperature. I tested this hypothesis on seven rocky intertidal invertebrate species by measuring the relative temperature scaling of their metabolic and ingestion rates as well as consumer interaction strength under lab conditions. Energetic efficiencies of these rocky intertidal invertebrates declined and species interaction strengths tended to increase with temperature. Thus, in the rocky intertidal, the mechanistic effect of temperature would be to lower community stability at higher temperatures. Chapter 4 tests if the mechanistic effects of temperature on ingestion rates and species interaction strengths seen in the lab are apparent under field conditions. Bruce Menge and I related bio-mimetic estimates of body temperatures to estimates of per capita mussel ingestion rates and species interaction strengths by the ochre sea star Pisaster ochraceus, a keystone predator of the rocky intertidal. We found a strong, positive effect of body temperature on both per capita ingestion rates and interaction strengths. However, the effects of season and the unique way in which P. ochraceus regulates body temperatures were also apparent, leaving room for adaptation and acclimation to partially compensate for the mechanistic constraint of body temperature. Community structure of the rocky intertidal is associated with environmental forcing due to upwelling, which delivers cold, nutrient rich water to the nearshore environment. As upwelling is driven by large-scale atmospheric pressure gradients, climate change has the potential to affect a wide range of significant ecological processes through changes in water temperature. In Chapter 5, my coauthors and I identified long-term trends in the phenology of upwelling events that are consistent with climate change predictions: upwelling events are becoming stronger and longer. As expected, longer upwelling events were related to lower average water temperatures in the rocky intertidal. Furthermore, recruitment rates of barnacles and mussels were associated with the phenology of upwelling events. Thus climate change is altering the mode and the tempo of environmental forcing in nearshore ecosystems, with ramifications for community structure and function. Ongoing, long-term changes in environmental forcing in rocky intertidal ecosystems provide an opportunity to understand how temperature shapes community structure and the ramifications of climate change. My dissertation research demonstrates that the effect of temperature on organismal performance is an important force structuring ecological communities and has potential as a tractable framework for predicting the community level effects of climate change.

Download or read book Unifying Ecology Across Scales Progress Challenges and Opportunities written by Mary I. O’Connor and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eBook is a collection of articles from a Frontiers Research Topic. Frontiers Research Topics are very popular trademarks of the Frontiers Journals Series: they are collections of at least ten articles, all centered on a particular subject. With their unique mix of varied contributions from Original Research to Review Articles, Frontiers Research Topics unify the most influential researchers, the latest key findings and historical advances in a hot research area! Find out more on how to host your own Frontiers Research Topic or contribute to one as an author by contacting the Frontiers Editorial Office: frontiersin.org/about/contact.

Download or read book Thermal Transgenerational Plasticity and Its Effect on Competitive Ability Consumer resource Dynamics in a Population of Daphnia Ambigua written by Julian Holmes and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global temperature increases are predicted to quicken in pace this century, and with them so will the likely impact on natural populations. The extent to which organisms will be able to keep pace with and adapt to these environmental changes is an unanswered question. It has been demonstrated that changing environments can induce changes in phenotypes that persist across generations. TGP may be an important means for populations to cope with climate change stress, but our understanding of these interactions is incomplete. Prior work showed that Daphnia program their offspring for faster development when reared under cooler temperatures. Here I tested the impact of thermal TGP in development on population dynamics and competitive interactions in a species of zooplankton (Daphnia ambigua) from a lake in Connecticut. I found that populations whose parents were reared at cool temperatures had greater rates of population increase when their offspring were transferred to a warmer temperature compared with treatments that experienced consistently warm conditions. This link between parental rearing temperature and rates of population growth are thus likely due to divergent transgenerational effects of temperature on the expression of life history traits. Though, this link between transgenerational responses and population dynamics were much weaker (and non-significant) when the populations were reared in larger mesocosms. My findings call for more research into the relationship between TGP and population dynamics and community interactions.

Download or read book Sensitivity Analysis Matrix Methods in Demography and Ecology written by Hal Caswell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book shows how to use sensitivity analysis in demography. It presents new methods for individuals, cohorts, and populations, with applications to humans, other animals, and plants. The analyses are based on matrix formulations of age-classified, stage-classified, and multistate population models. Methods are presented for linear and nonlinear, deterministic and stochastic, and time-invariant and time-varying cases. Readers will discover results on the sensitivity of statistics of longevity, life disparity, occupancy times, the net reproductive rate, and statistics of Markov chain models in demography. They will also see applications of sensitivity analysis to population growth rates, stable population structures, reproductive value, equilibria under immigration and nonlinearity, and population cycles. Individual stochasticity is a theme throughout, with a focus that goes beyond expected values to include variances in demographic outcomes. The calculations are easily and accurately implemented in matrix-oriented programming languages such as Matlab or R. Sensitivity analysis will help readers create models to predict the effect of future changes, to evaluate policy effects, and to identify possible evolutionary responses to the environment. Complete with many examples of the application, the book will be of interest to researchers and graduate students in human demography and population biology. The material will also appeal to those in mathematical biology and applied mathematics.

Download or read book Temperature Effects on Food Web Interactions written by Samuel Butler Fey and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Temperature has powerful effects on all scales of biological organization from biochemical reactions to ecosystem processes. Despite the well-appreciated influence and thorough understanding of the physiological and population consequences of temperature, it is difficult to predict how changing temperatures might restructure biological communities. One reason for this disconnect involves a lack of understanding of how temperature can alter biological interactions between species. I add to the understanding of the effects of temperature on species interactions by exploring 1) how temperature alters the success of Daphnia lumholtzi- a non-native cladoceran zooplanker-by changing species interactions and 2) the quality of a key ecological subsidy. I first addressed how temperature and increases in cyanobacteria alter resource competition between Daphnia lumholtzi and the native Daphnia pulex. I combined a laboratory competition experiment and mesocosm experiment to show that while D. lumholtzi may benefit from increases in temperature, associated increased cyanobacterial blooms may hinder its performance. Secondly, I conducted a field mesocosm experiment and a laboratory growth experiment to suggest that organismal thermal sensitivity may predict the outcome of temperature-mediated species interactions, and that D. lumholtzi may benefit from warmer water temperatures. Subsequently, I provide support the hypothesis that variable thermal sensitivities among a sunfish predator, D. lumholtzi, and D. pulex can generate temperature-dependent enemy release using both a mathematical model and a field experiment. Lastly, I addressed the potential for climate warming to impact lakes by altering the quality of ecological subsidies. I show that experimental soil warming can alter the chemical composition of deciduous leaves, the physical and chemical environment of the aquatic ecosystems to which leaves were added, and the pelagic food web. Compared to leaves from ambient-temperate soils, leaves from warmed soils decreased water column phosphorus and dissolved organic carbon, reducing bacterial densities. However, the diminished carbon and phosphorus resulting from soil warming also increased light availability that ultimately stimulated cladoceran zooplankton relative to ambient-temperature leaves. These results highlight the importance of conducting research across ecosystem boundaries to accurately predict the ecological consequences of climate change.

Download or read book Dynamic Food Webs written by Peter C de Ruiter and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2005-12-20 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dynamic Food Webs challenges us to rethink what factors may determine ecological and evolutionary pathways of food web development. It touches upon the intriguing idea that trophic interactions drive patterns and dynamics at different levels of biological organization: dynamics in species composition, dynamics in population life-history parameters and abundances, and dynamics in individual growth, size and behavior. These dynamics are shown to be strongly interrelated governing food web structure and stability and the role of populations and communities play in ecosystem functioning. Dynamic Food Webs not only offers over 100 illustrations, but also contains 8 riveting sections devoted to an understanding of how to manage the effects of environmental change, the protection of biological diversity and the sustainable use of natural resources. Dynamic Food Webs is a volume in the Theoretical Ecology series. Relates dynamics on different levels of biological organization: individuals, populations, and communities Deals with empirical and theoretical approaches Discusses the role of community food webs in ecosystem functioning Proposes methods to assess the effects of environmental change on the structure of biological communities and ecosystem functioning Offers an analyses of the relationship between complexity and stability in food webs

Download or read book The Joint Effect of Phenotypic Variation and Temperature on Predator prey Interactions written by Jean Philippe Gibert and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the factors underpinning to food web structure and stability is a long-standing issue in ecology. This is particularly important in a context of global climate change, where rising environmental temperatures may impact the way species interact, potentially leading to changes in food web structure and to secondary extinctions resulting from cascading effects. In order to understand and predict these changes, we need to hone our comprehension on the way predators and their prey interact. Recent studies suggest that, in order to do so, we need to focus on the traits controlling those interactions, such as body size. Mean body size and its intraspecific variation can in turn be affected by temperature, a pattern known as the temperature-size rule. To understand how warming may affect predator-prey interactions and through them, food web structure and dynamics, we thus first need to understand how traits, their within species variation, and temperature, may jointly affect these interactions. Here, I address these unknowns using both empirical and theoretical tools. I have shown that variation in the traits controlling predator-prey interactions may determine the strengths of these interactions, and through them, their stability and overall dynamics. I have also shown this to be truth for species living as metapopulations, where variation in the traits controlling migration plays an important role in determining their chance of persisting. Moreover, I showed empirically that many of these findings hold in a freshwater predator-prey system, and based on empirical results on how temperature affects body size and its variation, I made predictions as to how warming may affect interaction strengths in this system. I thus found evidence of temperature determining the way predators and their prey interact, leading to important changes in the body size structure of entire food webs across aquatic ecosystems. My results highlight how intraspecific variation has important yet largely overlooked ecological effects, and how these effects can be mediated by environmental temperature.

Download or read book Ecology Systematics and the Natural History of Predaceous Diving Beetles Coleoptera Dytiscidae written by Donald A. Yee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Predaceous diving beetles (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae) constitute one of the largest families of freshwater insects (~ 4,200 species). Although dytiscid adults and larvae are ubiquitous throughout a variety of aquatic habitats and are significant predators on other aquatic invertebrates and vertebrates, there are no compilations that have focused on summarizing the knowledge of their ecology, systematics, and biology. Such knowledge would benefit anyone working in aquatic systems where dytiscids are an important part of the food web. Moreover, this work will allow a greater appreciation of dytiscids as model organisms for investigations of fundamental principles derived from ecological and evolutionary theory. Contributed chapters are by authors who are actively engaged in studying dytiscids and each chapter offers a synthesis of the current knowledge of a variety of topics and will provide future directions for research.

Download or read book Biotic Interactions Shift Across Temperature and Ontogeny in an Intertidal Barnacle written by William King and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural systems provide beneficial goods and services to humanity. To maintain these benefits, modern science is tasked with predicting how natural systems respond to global change. Understanding the ecological processes that underly natural systems, such as interactions between organisms, can help improve such predictions and is thus a research priority. In this dissertation, I present novel findings on how ecological interactions vary across biotic and abiotic factors, and some potential consequences thereof. The hallmark of global change is warming. Warming is important because temperature controls biology at all levels of organization. Many organisms are also shrinking. This is important because body size is a fundamental driver of ecological processes. From survival and growth to reproduction, organismal vital rates vary with ontogeny. Research over the past two decades emphasize that knowledge of the direct effects of temperature and body size on organisms is inadequate to forecast community trajectories. Organisms do not exist in vacuum; they interact with neighbors and with predators. To improve understanding of how natural systems respond to global change, knowledge of the indirect effects - how biotic interactions change with temperature and body size - is required. The rocky intertidal zone provides a valuable system in which to study the ecological impacts of global change. Sessile ectotherms in particular have been used to elucidate principles that now pervade ecology. For example, the acorn barnacle Balanus glandula, though mostly mute and wholly illiterate, tells excellent ecological stories. Seemingly shy in its "squatter's nutshell"1 , a barnacle can reveal much about competition and facilitation given the right coaxing. Then there is the whelk Nucella ostrina. All who know them admire these "tiny wet beings straining calcium from the water and spinning it into polished dreams on their backs" . All except perhaps the barnacles, whom the whelks eat. Using organisms in the rocky intertidal zone, this dissertation examines how biotic interactions shift across temperature and ontogeny. In Chapter 1, I examine how multiple physical drivers concurrently affect a consumer-resource interaction. Evidence suggests widespread non-additive effects between multiple drivers; most of this evidence, however, is based on species-level responses, which is problematic because community responses to environmental change also depend on species interactions. To address this knowledge gap, I experimentally manipulated two physical drivers fundamental in intertidal systems - air and water temperatures - and examined the responses of the predator-prey interaction between B. glandula and N. ostrina. I obtained two key findings. First, air and water warming non-additively affected interaction strength: warm water mitigated a decrease in mean whelk feeding rate caused by warm air. Second, air warming had contrasting effects on individual growth rates of predator and prey. While whelk growth decreased in warm air, barnacle growth increased. These findings suggest that combined air and water warming will benefit barnacle populations more than their whelk predators. This study highlights the value of integrating species performances and interactions to understand how multiple physical drivers may affect community structure. In Chapter 2, I examine how environmental context governs trait-rate relationships. Trait and environmental controls on individual vital rates have been well documented, but the potential interactive effects between these controls have been less studied. This is problematic because global change often alters traits and environmental factors simultaneously; to predict the responses of systems, the interaction effects have to be understood. To investigate the links between traits, environmental factors, and demographic processes, I tested how the vital rates of B. glandula respond to the interactive effects of body size, temperature, and crowding. I found that body size and crowding interact to set barnacle survival and reproduction. In the field, crowding increased survival, an effect which became stronger with increasing body size. This effect was likely due to a shift in the balance of size-dependent competition and temperature-dependent facilitation. In mesocosms, crowding increased probability of being reproductive for smaller barnacles but decreased it for larger barnacles. I also found that warmer low tide temperatures decreased barnacle survival (field and mesocosms) and growth (mesocosms) regardless of body size. These findings suggest that incorporating environmental context is necessary to predicting vital rates from traits in barnacles. In Chapter 3, I examine how ontogenetic shifts in intraspecific interactions affect population dynamics. Compared to consumer-interactions, there is a dearth of information on how ontogenetic shifts in interactions within a trophic level affect population dynamics. This is problematic because interactions within a trophic level (e.g., competition and facilitation) are critical determinants of community structure. I used population models to investigate the conditions under which ontogenetic shifts in intraspecific interactions affect the population dynamics of B. glandula. I obtained two key findings. First, crowding modified the effect of body size in an important way: the direction of intraspecific interactions on barnacle growth shifted from negative to positive across size. At a small initial size, high crowding decreased barnacle growth. At a large initial size, however, crowding increased barnacle growth slightly. Second, populations modeled with theoretical crowding distributions showed differences in population growth rates consistent with the observed ontogenetic shifts. Populations with low crowding in established individuals and high crowding in recruits had the lowest population growth rate. Conversely, populations with high crowding in established individuals and low crowding in recruits had the highest population growth rate. This difference in population growth rate was mediated by changes in the population size distribution. These findings highlight the importance of considering how ontogenetic shifts in competition and facilitation alter population size structure and dynamics when predicting the responses of sessile ectotherms to global change. The firmament of ecology is vast. Although this dissertation focuses on a small subset of ecology, it crosses levels of organization, drawing concepts from physiological, population, and community ecology. It also combines fieldwork in the spirit of my academic ancestors (including G.E. Hutchinson and R.T. Paine) with modern techniques in statistical analysis and mathematical modeling. Together, this dissertation contributes basic knowledge on how biotic interactions shift across temperature and ontogeny, and how the latter shift may scale up to population dynamics. In doing so, it bolsters the foundation on which science builds to address global change.

Download or read book Ecology of Climate Change written by Eric Post and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-11 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rising temperatures are affecting organisms in all of Earth's biomes, but the complexity of ecological responses to climate change has hampered the development of a conceptually unified treatment of them. In a remarkably comprehensive synthesis, this book presents past, ongoing, and future ecological responses to climate change in the context of two simplifying hypotheses, facilitation and interference, arguing that biotic interactions may be the primary driver of ecological responses to climate change across all levels of biological organization. Eric Post's synthesis and analyses of ecological consequences of climate change extend from the Late Pleistocene to the present, and through the next century of projected warming. His investigation is grounded in classic themes of enduring interest in ecology, but developed around novel conceptual and mathematical models of observed and predicted dynamics. Using stability theory as a recurring theme, Post argues that the magnitude of climatic variability may be just as important as the magnitude and direction of change in determining whether populations, communities, and species persist. He urges a more refined consideration of species interactions, emphasizing important distinctions between lateral and vertical interactions and their disparate roles in shaping responses of populations, communities, and ecosystems to climate change.