Incorporating Physiological Data into Environmental Resilience Models
A special issue of Diversity (ISSN 1424-2818). This special issue belongs to the section "Marine Diversity".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2022) | Viewed by 3037
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Researchers typically concern themselves with abundance and diversity, with higher values normally deemed favorable. This interpretation prevails despite the fact that human population densities may just as commonly correlate inversely with individual metrics of health (e.g., lifespan). As a marine example, an aesthetically appealing reef with high coral abundance (Figures 1-2) may indeed draw more tourists and provide a number of ecosystem services; however, the respective corals are no healthier than conspecifics on marginalized, low-biodiversity reefs (& could actually be of diminished resilience). What this signifies is that, rather than exclusively counting the number of constituents during surveys, those interested in predicting how Earth’s ecosystems will respond to global climate change and other stressors need also consider the physiological condition of the resident organisms.
In this Special Issue of Diversity, I seek articles from anyone interested in applying what we know about organismal performance in the laboratory and in situ towards the development of tools that will allow us to triage ecosystems along a stress-susceptible to physiologically robust performance spectrum. Priority will be given to those articles that both develop diagnostic systems and exploit the data generated to construct models that can be used to delineate ecosystem health and resilience. A recent example of this is the work of Roach et al. (2021; Nat Ecol Evol), in which the authors linked metabolomic signatures to bleaching sensitivity in reef corals. This exciting article highlights the fact that, with the molecular and computational capacity now at our fingertips, it is time to move beyond recording temperature, counting organisms, and documenting habitat degradation and instead develop proactive, predictive management products that enable us to focus our efforts on those habitats and individuals of greatest conservation value.
Figures 1-2. Although corals occupy 100% of the benthos on these Indonesian (upper image) and Filipino (lower image) coral reefs, these habitats are of low resilience to global climate change given the overall dominance of highly environmentally sensitive coral species.
Dr. Anderson Mayfield
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- physiological data
- environmental resilience models
- coral reefs
- global climate change
- molecular biotechnology
- marine biology
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