Daniel J. Wieczynski

• PhD
• Postdoc at Duke University

As global environmental conditions continue to change at an unprecedented rate, many species will experience increases in natural and anthropogenic stress. Generally speaking, selection is expected to favor adaptations that reduce the negative impact of environmental stress (i.e., stress tolerance). However, natural environmental variables typicall...

Significance Microbes regulate nutrient flux and carbon storage within ecosystems, making them essential to the global carbon cycle and ecosystem responses to climate change. Understanding how climate change will alter microbial communities and how this will feed back to influence the pace of climate change requires linking processes across levels...

Assessing the impacts of anthropogenic degradation and climate change on global carbon cycling is hindered by a lack of clear, flexible and easy‐to‐use productivity models along with scarce trait and productivity data for parameterizing and testing those models. We provide a simple solution: a mechanistic framework (RS‐CFM) that combines remotely‐s...

Climate change is affecting how energy and matter flow through ecosystems, thereby altering global carbon and nutrient cycles. Microorganisms play a fundamental role in carbon and nutrient cycling and are thus an integral link between ecosystems and climate. Here, we highlight a major black box hindering our ability to anticipate ecosystem climate...

Mixotrophs are ubiquitous and integral to microbial food webs, but their impacts on the dynamics and functioning of broader ecosystems are largely unresolved. Here, we show that mixotrophy produces a unique type of food web module that exhibits unusual ecological dynamics, with surprising consequences for carbon flux under warming. We develop a gen...

Understanding how global warming shapes species evolution within communities is a pressing goal of ecology. Temperature affects interacting species and can lead to changes in species interactions, but how that will alter species evolutionary trajectories within complex food webs is poorly understood. Here we address 1) whether different predators a...

Ecosystem restoration can increase the health and resilience of nature and humanity. As a result, the international community is championing habitat restoration as a primary solution to address the dual climate and biodiversity crises. Yet most ecosystem restoration efforts to date have underperformed, failed, or been burdened by high costs that pr...

Microbial respiration alone releases massive amounts of Carbon (C) into the atmosphere per year, greatly impacting the global C cycle that fuels climate change. Larger microbial population growth often leads to larger standing biomass, which in turns leads to higher respiration. How rising temperatures might influence microbial population growth, h...

Microbes affect the global carbon cycle that influences climate change and are in turn influenced by environmental change. Here, we use data from a long‐term whole‐ecosystem warming experiment at a boreal peatland to answer how temperature and CO 2 jointly influence communities of abundant, diverse, yet poorly understood, non‐fungi microbial Eukary...

Microbes play a major role in the global carbon cycle that fuels climate change. But how microbes may in turn respond to climate change remains poorly understood. Here, we collect data from a long-term whole-ecosystem warming experiment at a boreal peatland to address how temperature and carbon dioxide jointly influence protist communities: i.e., a...

Anthropogenic increases in temperature and nutrient loads will likely impact food web structure and stability. Although their independent effects have been reasonably well studied, their joint effects-particularly on coupled ecological and phenotypic dynamics-remain poorly understood. Here we experimentally manipulated temperature and nutrient leve...

Biomass dynamics capture information on population dynamics and ecosystem-level processes (e.g., changes in production over time). Understanding how rising temperatures associated with global climate change influence biomass dynamics is thus a pressing issue in ecology. The total biomass of a species depends on its density and its average mass. Con...

Climate change is affecting how energy and matter flow within ecosystems, altering global carbon and nutrient cycles. Microorganisms play a fundamental role in carbon and nutrient cycling and are thus an integral link between ecosystems and climate. Here, we highlight a major black box hindering our ability to anticipate ecosystem climate responses...

Mixotrophs are ubiquitous and integral to microbial food webs, but their impacts on the dynamics and functioning of broader ecosystems are largely unresolved. Here, we show that mixotrophy produces a unique, dynamic type of food web module that exhibits unusual ecological dynamics, with surprising consequences for carbon flux under warming. We find...

Non-native species and climate change pose serious threats to global biodiversity. However, the roles of climate, dispersal, and competition are difficult to disentangle in heterogeneous landscapes. We combine empirical data and theory to examine how these forces influence the spread of non-native species in Lake Baikal. We analyze the potential fo...

As biomass dynamics capture information on population dynamics and ecosystem-level processes (e.g., changes in production over time), understanding how rising temperatures associated with global climate change influence biomass dynamics is a pressing issue in ecology. The total biomass of a species depends on its density and its average mass. Disen...

Body size is a fundamental trait linked to many ecological processes—from individuals to ecosystems. Although the effects of body size on metabolism are well‐known, the potential reciprocal effects of body size and density are less clear. Specifically, (a) whether changes in body size or density more strongly influence the other and (b) whether cou...

Understanding why food webs thrive or collapse is a major challenge that has been mostly studied in terms of consumer-resource interaction strengths or the topology of the interaction network. Yet the biological basis and relative importance of these properties are hotly debated. Here, we construct a model that incorporates body-mass constraints on...

Climate warming will likely disrupt the flow of matter and energy within ecosystems, threatening the global carbon balance. Microorganisms are fundamental components of carbon cycling and are thus integral to ecosystem climate responses. However, ecosystem responses to warming are uncertain due to the functional and trophic complexity of microbial...

Anthropogenic increases in temperature and nutrient loads will likely impact food web structure and stability. Though their independent effects have been well studied, their joint effects-particularly on coupled ecological and phenotypic dynamics-remain poorly understood. Here we experimentally manipulated temperature and nutrient levels in microbi...

1. Body size is a fundamental trait linked to many ecological processes-from individuals to ecosystems. Although the effects of body size on metabolism are well-known, how body size influences, and is influenced by, population growth and density is less clear. Specifically, 1) whether body size, or population dynamics, more strongly influences the...

Predicting food web structure in future climates is a pressing goal of ecology. These predictions may be impossible without a solid understanding of the factors that structure current food webs. The most fundamental aspect of food web structure—the relationship between the number of links and species—is still poorly understood. Some species interac...

Microbial communities regulate ecosystem responses to climate change. But predicting these responses is challenging due to complex interactions among processes at multiple ecological scales. Organismal traits that determine individual performance and ecological interactions are essential for scaling up predictions of environmental responses from in...

Forests are integral to global carbon cycling but are threatened by anthropogenic degradation and climate change. Assessing this global threat has been hindered by a lack of clear, flexible, and easy-to-use productivity models along with a lack of functional trait and productivity data for parameterizing and testing those models. Current productivi...

Spatially continuous data on functional diversity will improve our ability to predict global change impacts on ecosystem properties. We applied methods that combine imaging spectroscopy and foliar traits to estimate remotely sensed functional diversity in tropical forests across an Amazon-to-Andes elevation gradient (215 to 3537 m). We evaluated th...

Understanding constraints on consumer-resource body size-ratios is fundamentally important from both ecological and evolutionary perspectives. By analyzing data on 4,685 consumer-resource interactions from nine ecological communities, we show that in spatially complex environments—where consumers can forage in both two (2D, e.g., benthic zones) and...

Much ecological research aims to explain how climate impacts biodiversity and ecosystem-level processes through functional traits that link environment with individual performance. However, the specific climatic drivers of functional diversity across space and time remain unclear due largely to limitations in the availability of paired trait and cl...

Understanding the processes that influence range expansions during climate warming is paramount for predicting population extirpations and preparing for the arrival of non-native species. While climate warming occurs over a background of variation due to cyclical processes and irregular events, the temporal structure of the thermal environment is l...

The impact of temporal variation in the environment, specifically the amount of temporal autocorrelation, on population processes is of growing interest in ecology and evolutionary biology. It was recently discovered that temporal autocorrelation in the environment can significantly increase the abundance of populations that would otherwise have lo...

Background/Question/Methods Spatial synchrony in population dynamics is a major determinant of important ecological processes, including regional extinction risk. It is well known that spatially synchronized environmental fluctuations can drive population synchrony (the Moran effect), which increases the probability of extinction by causing multi...

Background/Question/Methods Many abiotic and biotic factors exhibit stochastic dynamics with some degree of temporal autocorrelation. This autocorrelation is known to influence several ecological processes in important ways. One particular consequence that has drawn recent interest is the so-called ‘inflationary effect’; populations that fluctuat...