Dantzer B, Mabry K E, Bernhardt J R, Cox R M, Francis C D, Ghalambor C K, Hoke K L, Jha S, Ketterson E, Levis N A, McCain K M, Patricelli G L, Paull S H, Pinter-Wollman N, Safran R J, Schwartz T S, Throop H L, Zaman L, Martin L B
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109,USA.
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109,USA.
Integr Org Biol. 2023 Sep 25;5(1):obad036. doi: 10.1093/iob/obad036. eCollection 2023.
Human activities are rapidly changing ecosystems around the world. These changes have widespread implications for the preservation of biodiversity, agricultural productivity, prevalence of zoonotic diseases, and sociopolitical conflict. To understand and improve the predictive capacity for these and other biological phenomena, some scientists are now relying on observatory networks, which are often composed of systems of sensors, teams of field researchers, and databases of abiotic and biotic measurements across multiple temporal and spatial scales. One well-known example is NEON, the US-based National Ecological Observatory Network. Although NEON and similar networks have informed studies of population, community, and ecosystem ecology for years, they have been minimally used by organismal biologists. NEON provides organismal biologists, in particular those interested in NEON's focal taxa, with an unprecedented opportunity to study phenomena such as range expansions, disease epidemics, invasive species colonization, macrophysiology, and other biological processes that fundamentally involve organismal variation. Here, we use NEON as an exemplar of the promise of observatory networks for understanding the causes and consequences of morphological, behavioral, molecular, and physiological variation among individual organisms.
人类活动正在迅速改变世界各地的生态系统。这些变化对生物多样性保护、农业生产力、人畜共患疾病的流行以及社会政治冲突具有广泛影响。为了理解和提高对这些及其他生物现象的预测能力，一些科学家现在依赖观测网络，这些网络通常由传感器系统、实地研究团队以及跨多个时间和空间尺度的非生物和生物测量数据库组成。一个著名的例子是美国的国家生态观测网络（NEON）。尽管NEON和类似网络多年来一直为种群、群落和生态系统生态学研究提供信息，但有机体生物学家对它们的使用却很少。NEON为有机体生物学家，尤其是那些对NEON重点分类群感兴趣的生物学家，提供了前所未有的机会来研究诸如范围扩张、疾病流行、入侵物种定殖、宏观生理学以及其他从根本上涉及有机体变异的生物过程等现象。在此，我们以NEON为例，说明观测网络在理解个体生物之间形态、行为、分子和生理变异的原因及后果方面的前景。
