Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Energy cannot be created nor destroyed only transferred from one form to another. This means that for any organism or ecosystem to exist and persist into the future, energy balance (energy out = energy in) must be achieved and maintained. Working within this framework, animal activity has recently emerged as an excellent proxy of energetic pathways that is easy to measure, responds immediately to environmental change, and alters ecological outcomes. My long-term objective is test the working hypothesis that animal activity, an energetically determined trait, and seasonality interact to control both energy balance within organisms, and the flow of energy between organisms to define how populations, species, and food webs respond to global change. By combining empirical field observations with mathematical modelling centered around metabolic theory, the short term objectives of my research program aim to generate unifying theory that is generalized across species of both the causes and the consequences of activity, and to determine how activity and energy balance links environment change to ecological outcomes. Specifically, we aim to determine: 1) What shapes the timing, extent, and variability of activity in organisms? 2) What are the consequences of activity variation on individuals, populations, and food webs? 3) How changing seasonality alters energy balance in individuals, species, and food webs? Over the next five years, we will study activity and seasonality across species, space, and time by using field data collected at different scales (seconds to weeks, and individuals to populations) and locations. We will investigate fine scale individual and population scale activity patterns in single species (snowshoe hares, red squirrels, and Canada lynx) to develop basic theory about activity. We will test the generality of that theory using broad scale multi-species activity data from trail cameras deployed across Canada. Using this same trail camera data combined with a cross boreal snowshoe monitoring project, we will investigate how changing lengths of seasons (shortening winters) impacts energy balance in organisms and populations. Studying activity and seasonality in this way across populations and species allows for the generalities of patterns to be assessed, caveats to be identified, and variables that are correlated in a particular species or population to be disentangled. The proposed research will produce and improve the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical bridges between activity variation, seasonality, and ecological outcomes, and lays the groundwork the incorporation of behaviour into population and community ecological studies, and for consideration of population and community processes in behavioural ecology.