RII Track-4: Ecological Community Responses to Global Change: Predicting Effects on Community Dynamics and Ecosystem Stability

This Research Infrastructure Improvement RII Track-4 grant will explore how ecological communities respond to increased environmental change, with a focus on alpine ecosystems. Global change factors, such as increases in temperature and changes in precipitation represent severe threats to the stability of ecological communities. This is especially true in alpine ecosystems where the climate is changing at a rapid rate with high variability among years in both temperature and precipitation patterns.

The project will examine how these global change factors alter ecological communities and their stability through time. The proposed work will yield transformative and sustained benefits in jurisdictional research capacity within Wyoming, positively transforming the career trajectory of the non-tenured investigator. The work will foster a new collaboration between the investigator, a PhD student, and the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research Network in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

The investigator and collaborators will host workshops at Niwot Ridge for Wyoming and Colorado scientists, spearheading cross-state collaborations. Additionally, the project will produce an educational module on data visualization and biological statistics that will be integrated into a newly developed course required for undergraduate biology majors. The module will be disseminated broadly through an open-source publication.

Anthropogenic global change, such as increases in temperature, more variable precipitation regimes, and nitrogen deposition, have previously been demonstrated to have severe ramifications for species persistence, but how these factors may alter ecological communities, including their synchrony patterns and stability remains an open question. The proposed project will examine the effect of multiple, simultaneous global change drivers on alpine community dynamics and ecosystem stability.

It will specifically address the following objectives: (1) determine if global change drivers yield increased synchrony of species’ fluctuations and decreased temporal stability of ecosystems; (2) quantify if locations that have historically experienced higher environmental variability are buffered in their responses to current anthropogenic changes; and (3) build a theoretical model for predicting community synchrony and ecosystem stability that incorporates multiple simultaneous global change factors and species interactions. The project will integrate the investigator’s expertise in ecological modeling with 50-years of alpine community monitoring at Niwot Ridge, including collecting and analyzing community composition data from several ongoing experiments.

The investigator and PhD student will additionally conduct a species germination experiment and will create a new dynamical model of species fluctuations and ecosystem stability through time under global change. The model will be coupled with empirical results to create a predictive framework for future community dynamics. This project will enhance our ability to predict how community synchrony and ecosystem stability will change with increasing global change, especially in alpine ecosystems.

The project is additionally expected to yield sustained jurisdictional benefits and enhanced research capacity at the interface of ecological theory and alpine ecology.

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.