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.