NSFGEO-NERC - Why are complex habitats more diverse?

OVERVIEW
One of community ecology's few paradigms is that complex habitats tend to contain more species and at higher abundances than simple habitats. Currently, human and natural disturbances are changing the complexity of habitats faster than at any previous time in history. Understanding and predicting the effects of these changes on biodiversity is now of paramount importance. Yet, we have only a crude, correlative understanding of how complexity changes affect biodiversity, predicting that if habitat becomes flatter, species' diversity and abundances decline. Generating accurate predictions requires integration of the geometric and ecological principles that underpin complexity-biodiversity relationships. This project will build the tools to allow us to make process-based predictions about biodiversity change as a function of habitat complexity. It will do so by using mathematical theory, experimental manipulations, and ecological observations to build the mechanistic framework needed to make these predictions. We use a highly complex species rich system, coral reefs, as a case-study to implement and test predictions. This research will produce a general framework for testing complexity-biodiversity relationships globally and across ecosystems.

INTELLECTUAL MERIT
The major innovation of this research is integrating three disparate research areas-biophysics, 3D surface modelling technology, and ecological theory. This integration will for the first time allow us to quantify the interactions between biodiversity and 3D habitat structure. While the underlying components of this project are very effective on their own, they have until now developed independently of each other and the benefit of combining them to model complexity-biodiversity relationships has only recently been recognized. Despite intense interest in modelling the effects of environmental change, few present-day efforts to do so have a mechanistic basis, and almost all build in some way on the correlative responses of organisms to the environment, thus limiting their generality and predictive power. In contrast, our approach will develop basic theory that scales individual-level habitat associations to ecosystem-level common currencies using geometric principles, novel imaging technologies, ecological theory, rich historical data sets and experimental manipulation. Success in this endeavor will represent a major breakthrough in ecological research and understanding, and provide a much-needed framework for predicting ecosystem responses to changing dimensionality of habitat structure.

BROADER IMPACTS
This project will train 2 post-docs, 1-2 PhD student and up to 10 undergraduate and other interns on the use of cutting-edge technology to quantify ecological change. Our research will provide a tool for assessing and projecting the impact of ecosystem flattening on biodiversity and ecosystem function, as well as for forecasting the impact of change on our ecosystems and economy. We will maximize the impact of this tool by publishing code on GitHub and producing vignettes which make the theory developed accessible to a broader audience of scientists and practitioners. We will promote these tools online through websites and social media, and will run summer workshops to promote the uptake of this approach to explore scenarios of change and predict ecological consequences of different environmental management actions. The 3D maps generated in this project are particularly effective at communicating ecosystem change to a broad audience. We will create a web interface to visualize these changes and will promote them to schools and through HIMB's outreach program. Finally, we will engage more broadly in the dissemination of the results of our project through a science-art collaborative exhibition, which will explore changing shapes in the natural world.