CAREER: Impacts of Environmental Filtering versus Species Interactions on Persistence and Coexistence in a Warming World

About This Grant

Changing temperature regimes represent a severe threat to ecological communities, altering species growth, survival, and reproduction, which can result in increased extinction risks, changes to which species can coexist, and ultimately shifts in patterns of species diversity. However, to date, most studies of population and community responses to temperature regimes tend to examine either a handful of species or, alternatively, aggregated patterns like the total number of species (richness) in an ecosystem. The proposed research will improve understanding of how different temperature regimes alter ecological interactions at different scales. This CAREER project integrates research, education, and public engagement by creating a network – WyoCo Warming – of experimental sites with local communities experiencing both ambient and increased temperature conditions. Sites will be strategically placed across Colorado and Wyoming to engage local K-12 students, undergraduates, recreators, and land managers and will be include educational videos, K-12 lesson plans, and an educational website. WyoCo Warming sites will be monitored by undergraduate and graduate students as part of a new Community Ecology course. Creating a predictive framework for how changing temperature regimes will alter coexistence and richness patterns requires disentangling direct environmental effects from indirect effects of species interactions, both within the current community and in novel communities created via community reshuffling and range expansion. Indeed, interactions between species can further enhance direct environmental effects, buffer species from negative environmental impacts, or even mask critical thresholds as populations and communities transition between different possible configurations. This research combines global change experiments, demographic modeling, and coexistence theory to create and test a quantitative framework that disentangles abiotic and biotic effects. Using manipulative transplant experiments in the alpine and subalpine, the research will test how competition and facilitation with neighbors can mediate persistence of a range expanding subalpine species, accounting for novel species interactions with the alpine community. Further, by pairing experiments manipulating both temperature regimes and local plant neighborhood densities with mathematical models, the research will quantify how species demography and coexistence within current alpine communities depends on environmental versus biotic effects. Integrating global change research with education, the project will create a new network of open-top warming chambers across Wyoming and Colorado (WyoCo Warming), thereby engaging stakeholders, land managers, and students and facilitating understanding of temperature impacts on species richness in stakeholders’ local ecosystems. Multiple years of data from WyoCo Warming will be used to inform local land management and to facilitate undergraduate and graduate student training at the nexus of global change ecology and data-theory integration. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.