Life in fluctuating environments

A major unknown dimension of global change is how environmental change is altering the informational milieu of living systems. Many organisms maintain steady internal conditions required for physiological functioning through feedback mechanisms that allow internal conditions to remain near a set point. However, living systems, ranging from phytoplankton cells to trees, persist in fluctuating environments not only by responding to change after it has occurred, but also by anticipating change through a variety of ecological and evolutionary cue and signal-based mechanisms. These feedforward mechanisms, in contrast to feedback mechanisms, allow biological systems to prepare or prime themselves for environmental change so that they can adaptively buffer or exploit expected environmental change.

Drawing on concepts from systems biology, physiology and evolutionary biology, we have developed a new framework for understanding how living systems deal with environmental variability which builds upon commonly studied feedback processes to incorporate a range of anticipatory, cue-based feedforward mechanisms, such as phenology. All living systems exploit the information in correlated environmental conditions to predict future environments through feedforward mechanisms. Explicitly considering feedforward processes may dramatically change our predictions of responses to global environmental change.

Read more:

Bernhardt, J.R., O’Connor, M.I., Sunday, J.M and A. Gonzalez. Life in fluctuating environments. 2020. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. [code and data]

Bernhardt, J.R., Sunday, J.M., Thompson, P.L. and M.I. O’Connor 2018. Nonlinear averaging of thermal experience predicts population growth rates in a thermally variable environment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. [data][code]