USING THERMAL NICHE THEORY TO PREDICT COMMUNITY DYNAMICS IN FRESHWATER ECOSYSTEMS

Climate warming is one of the biggest drivers of change in many ecological systems. However, we remain largely ignorant about its impacts on many groups of organisms and their ecological interactions, particularly in freshwater environments. Within these systems, bacterivorous micro- and meiofauna are key taxa in regulating bacterial communities, and thus have consequences for bacterial-driven ecosystem functions (e.g. nutrient cycling). In the context of warming environments, it is critical to know how warming alters the complex web of interactions between bacteria and the grazer community, if we are to understand the functional implications of climate change. The studentship will use the ecological niche concept as a foundation to understand component and community wide responses to simulated global warming and the concomitant ecosystem functioning outcomes. The overall goal of the studentship will be to investigate how ecological niche breadth influences tipping points and community interactions, including food webs within freshwater lentic microbial eukaryote communities associated with warming.

The proposed project has the potential to have huge impacts on both the academic and non-academic communities, as it addresses a fundamentally important question of global significance: what are the consequences of warming for biodiversity and the functioning of multi species systems? At an international level it has clear resonance for bodies involved with both scientific research and its implementation into policy, such as the IPCC and Diversitas/Future Earth (the Project Leader is a member of the Scientific Committee of the ecoSERVICES Project within Future Earth). At a national level, as an example, the British Ecology Society have recently produced a specially commissioned volume of Ecological Issues on Extreme Climatic Events in Freshwater Ecosystems that was launched at the Houses of Parliament in June 2013. The Principal Investigator (Woodward) leads the BES Aquatic Group and was also one of the authors of the report, which stresses the need to take a more integrated approach and to incorporate consideration of the microbial drivers of ecosystem service provision (e.g., carbon sequestration), and to link the underlying science more explicitly to future regulatory and management decisions.

The main national beneficiaries of this research among the end-user and stakeholder communities include the major UK environmental/conservation agencies (Department of Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Environment Agency (EA), Natural England (NE), Countryside Council for Wales (CCW), Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS)), for whom understanding, predicting and mitigating the impacts of climate change in natural ecosystems is an essential remit falling under the 10 year Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) programme (www.nerc.ac.uk/research/programmes/lwec/). In particular, the outputs from our bioinformatics databases can ultimately be used to inform policy decisions regarding climate change and human induced perturbations to natural ecosystems.

The research outputs will also aid other regulatory and legislative end-users in identifying systems that may be particularly sensitive to climate change and will therefore also be of interest to commercial bodies (e.g. Syngenta, who work closely with Prof. Muggleton, and Unilever both have interest in understanding how warming will affect microbial assemblages and carbon sequestration). These include environmental consultancies and water companies, and industries that emit thermal discharges to aquatic systems, which are subject to biomonitoring and legislative regulation (e.g. the Scottish Speyside distillery industry that is monitored and regulated by SEPA).

Finally, the theoretical developments and new data gathered will be of particular interest to members of the scientific community, including those working in other fields of climate-change research outside the current Research Team's remit (e.g. IPCC climate-modelling scientists) as well as those involved in more closely-aligned research networks (e.g. Diversitas/Future Earth; EU REFRESH projects; NERC BESS Thematic Programme), and we believe that the proposal will open up important and exciting new avenues of both pure and applied research.