Aquatic Functional Biodiversity

An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective

Andrea Belgrano, Guy Woodward, Ute Jacob

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780124170155
• eBook ISBN: 9780124170209
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Aquatic Functional Biodiversity: An Ecological and Evolutionary Perspective provides a general conceptual framework by some of the most prominent investigators in the field for how to link eco-evolutionary approaches with functional diversity to understand and conserve the provisioning of ecosystem services in aquatic systems. Rather than producing another methodological book, the editors and authors primarily concentrate on defining common grounds, connecting conceptual frameworks and providing examples by a more detailed discussion of a few empirical studies and projects, which illustrate key ideas and an outline of potential future directions and challenges that are expected in this interdisciplinary research field.Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in using network approaches to disentangle the relationship between biodiversity, community structure and functioning. Novel methods for model construction are being developed constantly, and modern methods allow for the inclusion of almost any type of explanatory variable that can be correlated either with biodiversity or ecosystem functioning. As a result these models have been widely used in ecology, conservation and eco-evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, there remains a considerable gap on how well these approaches are feasible to understand the mechanisms on how biodiversity constrains the provisioning of ecosystem services.- Defines common theoretical grounds in terms of terminology and conceptual issues- Connects theory and practice in ecology and eco-evolutionary sciences- Provides examples for successful biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service management

Section I

Theoretical Background

Outline

Chapter 1. From Metabolic Constraints on Individuals to the Dynamics of Ecosystems

Chapter 2. Ecological Effects of Intraspecific Consumer Biodiversity for Aquatic Communities and Ecosystems

Chapter 3. How Does Evolutionary History Alter the Relationship between Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function?

Chapter 4. Effects of Metacommunity Networks on Local Community Structures: From Theoretical Predictions to Empirical Evaluations

Chapter 1

From Metabolic Constraints on Individuals to the Dynamics of Ecosystems

Samraat Pawar¹, Anthony I. Dell², and Van M. Savage^{3,4,5 1}Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Ascot, Berkshire, UK ²National Great Rivers Research and Education Center, Alton, IL, USA ³Department of Biomathematics, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA ⁴Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA ⁵Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, USA

Abstract

A major challenge in biology is to predict eco-evolutionary dynamics—coupled changes in the ecological dynamics of population density and the evolution of phenotypic (functional trait) variation within and between species—of entire communities and ecosystems. Although mathematical and computational tools allow eco-evolutionary dynamics to be simulated, it is difficult to isolate underlying mechanisms and therefore establish if simulated dynamics are relevant to the real world where the physical environment changes constantly over space and time. We argue that this problem can be resolved, or at least simplified, by first quantifying biomechanical and metabolic constraints on individual organisms, and then scaling these constraints up though ecological interactions to communities. This approach is logical also because environmental fluctuations affect ecosystems through their direct impacts on the fitness of individual organisms. We highlight recent theoretical and empirical advances toward the development of a mechanistic and metabolic-based understanding of trophic interactions and their eco-evolutionary consequences. In particular, we show how a metabolic theory of species interactions can naturally capture the ubiquitous effects of environmental temperature and body size constraints on community dynamics. Nevertheless, this theory is very much a work in progress, and we identify a number of important hurdles that stand in the way of a general, mechanistic understanding of the eco-evolutionary dynamics of aquatic ecosystems.

Keywords

Biomechanics; Body size; Consumer–resource dynamics; Fitness; Metabolism; Population dynamics; Spatial dimensionality; Stability; Temperature; Traits; Trophic interactions

Introduction

Abiotic factors, such as temperature or the dimensionality of space within which organisms live, move, and search for food, directly impact ecological systems at the level of metabolic rate (rate of energy use) of individual organisms. Individual metabolic rate sets the “pace of life” for populations through generation time and maximal growth rate, r_max (Brown et al., 2004; Savage et al., 2004), which also scales up to influence coupled ecological and evolutionary dynamics. Therefore, understanding how environmental factors constrain individual metabolic rate, and how these individual-level constraints influence population dynamics of the whole interacting community, is key for understanding ecosystems (Figure 1). Indeed, there is now increasing consensus that individual physiology is fundamental for predicting how global climate change affects the eco-evolutionary dynamics of ecosystems (Manila et al., 1990; Allen et al., 2005; Lavergne et al., 2010; Yvon-Durocher et al., 2011; Dell et al., 2011; Thuiller et al., 2013). Furthermore, understanding how these dynamics differ between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems is an interesting and important problem (Cohen and Fenchel, 1994; Shurin et al., 2006).

Figure 1 The study of coupled ecological and evolutionary dynamics is inherently hierarchical, each level (individuals, interactions, and interaction networks) comprising a system with distinct measurable dynamics. Note that although we deal mostly with consumer-resource (or trophic) interactions in this paper, we use the more general term “interaction” because many of the principles we discuss also apply to, or involve, other types of interactions such as intraspecific interactions. The bidirectional arrows connecting levels indicate that ecological (e.g., changes in abundance) and evolutionary (e.g., changes in trait distributions) feedback from one level can influence the system structure and dynamics in another. We include population dynamics and mean fitness as systemic properties of interactions, because no population grows or evolves in isolation from other populations in nature. Also note that community stability embodies the coupled dynamics of multiple populations, and that community-level traits, under our definition, consist of distributions of individual-level or interaction-level traits across species.

The last two decades have heralded a golden age for research on physiological ecology. This new surge of research has led to the publication of key concept...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Contributors
• Perspective: Functional Biodiversity during the Anthropocene
• Section I. Theoretical Background
• Section II. Across Aquatic Ecosystems
• Section III. In the Wild: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service Conservation
• Epilogue: The Robustness of Aquatic Biodiversity Functioning under Environmental Change: The Ythan Estuary, Scotland
• Index