Biological traits, geographic distributions, and species conservation in aquatic ecosystems

Abstract

Aquatic ecosystems (both marine and freshwater) have long served as model systems for exploring the role of environmental stressors on organismal performance and survival, the biogeographic distributions of populations and species, and ultimately the diversity, functioning, and stability of ecosystems (Adams, 2002; Forbes, 1887; MacArthur & Wilson, 2001; Paine, 1969; Somero et al., 2017 ). Climate change, alien species invasions, land use change, urbaniza-tion, and other anthropogenic impacts have all been demonstrated to impair aquatic ecosystems at multiple levels of biological orga-nization within aquatic ecosystems (Karr, 1991; Doney et al., 2012; Harley et al., 2006; Poloczanska et al., 2013). Consequently, ap-proaches that include biological traits (e.g., physiological, be-havioural, phenological, and functional) at multiple spatial–temporal scales are critical for forecasting responses of aquatic ecosystems to future environmental changes; from individual organisms to en-tire ecosystems (Deutsch et al., 2015; Dong et al., 2022; Sunday et al., 2014). A merger of different biological scales has great po-tential for the development of approaches to quantitatively evaluate and forecast ongoing and future responses to climate change and human activities.