Multidisciplinary and Integrative Ecophysiological Approaches

Dear Colleagues,

A major current scientific challenge is to understand and predict the responses of ecosystems to global change in order to develop robust tools that inform stakeholders and policy makers, enabling them to make environmental policy decisions preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services on which human life depends.

This challenge necessarily implies an integrative understanding of the functionality of these systems at different scales (i.e., trophic web, populations, species, organisms, tissues, cells, molecules) in response to environmental variability. It is therefore necessary to gain knowledge on the capacity of organisms to respond to, and to cope with environmental variability, at different levels of organisations.

The approaches usually used to understand the response of organisms draw on several juxtaposed disciplines of biology, such as genomics, biochemistry, physiology, or ecology. However, all could be fully included within the terms of ecophysiology, which is defined as the study of how an organism is modulated by the environment, without specification of the level of organisation. Ecophysiology includes the modulation of different levels of integration of an organism, such as gene expression, metabolite synthesis or catabolism, tissue and organ functioning, as well as whole organism performance determinant for fitness such as growth, reproductive success or behavior, in response to environmental variability.

Advancing multidisciplinary ecophysiological approaches to enhance our understanding of organism responses to new environmental conditions is critical to incorporate proximal biological mechanisms of acclimation and adaptive response (microevolution and phenotypic plasticity) in predictive models linking changing environmental scenarios to organisms’ distribution and abundance and further maintain humankind’s supply of goods and services as global change intensifies.

This Special Issue aims to propose a collection of studies that use multiplinary approaches in ecophysiology to understand organisms’ response to environmental variability in applying basic research to address current and future challenges to socioecosystems, in particular in the sustainability of natural ecosystems in the context of global climatic and anthropogenic change. Papers must propose new ideas and combined ecophysiological methodologies that will contribute to help toward an integrative understanding of organism response under changing environmental conditions. Publications selected for this Special Issue will benefit from high visibility and wide dissemination.

Dr. Marie Vagner
Guest Editor

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• combined approaches
• global change
• ecophysiology
• multistressors
• organisms
• phenotypic plasticity
• reaction norm
• integrative approaches
• changing environment
• physiological functions
• individual performance
• fitness