Towards a unified understanding of species invasions along chemical stress gradients

Predicting how ecological systems respond to environmental change is hampered by their inherent complexity - processes operating at one scale of organisation lead to emergent properties at higher levels of organisation. One area where this challenge is particularly acute is ecological risk assessment (ERA), where there is a pressing need to understand how chemicals alter ecological

communities and ecosystem processes. Ecotoxicologists know a great deal about how chemicals impact individual organisms. Much less is known about their cascading effects on higher levels of biological organisation and how these processes interact with non-chemical drivers of ecological change, such as invasive species. The central goal of this PhD is to address that knowledge gap.