Establishing a regional interdisciplinary resilience center: a bottom-up approach.

Both natural and manmade disasters have severely impacted the region of Southeast Texas over the past few decades, and this has negatively affected the socio-economic well-being of the region. The state of Texas has suffered 200-250 billion dollars in damages from natural and manmade disasters since 2010. Given the region's strategic importance to the nation's energy and security, developing resilience knowledge and multi-disaster resilience research focused on issues pertaining to the region is needed.

Limitations of trait-based approaches for stressor assessment: The case of freshwater invertebrates and climate drivers.

The appeal of trait-based approaches for assessing environmental vulnerabilities arises from the potential insight they provide into the mechanisms underlying the changes in populations and community structure. Traits can provide ecologically based explanations for observed responses to environmental changes, along with predictive power gained by developing relationships between traits and environmental variables. Despite these potential benefits, questions remain regarding the utility and limitations of these approaches, which we explore focusing on the following questions: (a) How reliable are predictions of biotic responses to changing conditions based on single trait-environment relationships? (b) What factors constrain detection of single trait-environment relationships, and how can they be addressed? (c) Can we use information on meta-community processes to reveal conditions when assumptions underlying trait-based studies are not met? We address these questions by reviewing published literature on aquatic invertebrate communities from stream ecosystems.

Vulnerability of stream community composition and function to projected thermal warming and hydrologic change across ecoregions in the western United States.

Shifts in biodiversity and ecological processes in stream ecosystems in response to rapid climate change will depend on how numerically and functionally dominant aquatic insect species respond to changes in stream temperature and hydrology. Across 253 minimally perturbed streams in eight ecoregions in the western USA, we modeled the distribution of 88 individual insect taxa in relation to existing combinations of maximum summer temperature, mean annual streamflow, and their interaction. We used a heat map approach along with downscaled general circulation model (GCM) projections of warming and streamflow change to estimate site-specific extirpation likelihood for each taxon, allowing estimation of whole-community change in streams across these ecoregions.

A structured and dynamic framework to advance traits-based theory and prediction in ecology.

Predicting changes in community composition and ecosystem function in a rapidly changing world is a major research challenge in ecology. Traits-based approaches have elicited much recent interest, yet individual studies are not advancing a more general, predictive ecology. Significant progress will be facilitated by adopting a coherent theoretical framework comprised of three elements: an underlying trait distribution, a performance filter defining the fitness of traits in different environments, and a dynamic projection of the performance filter along some environmental gradient.