Researchers at Michigan State University and the Carnegie Institution for Science have developed a model that connects microscopic biology to macroscopic ecology, which could deepen our understanding of nature’s laws and create new opportunities in ecosystem management.
Researchers at Michigan State University and the Carnegie Institution for Science have developed a model that connects microscopic biology to macroscopic ecology, which could deepen our understanding of nature’s laws and create new opportunities in ecosystem management.
Reporting in the journal Science on Feb. 15, the team showed how microscopic relationships in plankton — such as between an organism’s size and nutrient consumption — scales up to predictably affect food webs.
“Using data that other researchers have measured at the microscale about these organisms, our model can predict what’s happening at the scale of whole ecosystems,” said Jonas Wickman, a postdoctoral research associate with MSU’s College of Natural Science and first author of the new paper.
“We can now show how lower-level rules of life feed into these higher levels based on ecological interactions and evolutionary considerations,” said Elena Litchman, a senior staff scientist at Carnegie's Biosphere Sciences and Engineering division. “Up until now, people had mostly considered these levels in isolation.”
Read more at Michigan State University
Image: Christopher Klausmeier, a Michigan State University Research Foundation Professor, and Elena Litchman, a senior staff scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Science, study plankton, in part, to better understand the fundamental rules of nature. (Credit: Bethany Bohlen/W. K. Kellogg Biological Station/MSU)
