Ecology has become at the forefront of all of our societal problems, whether it’s disease, climate change, biodiversity, sustainable foods—those are all ecological problems.

We can’t solve our problems without also advancing our understanding of nature. I really want to dive into the intersection between biodiversity change and climate change, and understand feedbacks between those two systems, understand areas where biodiversity makes systems more resilient to climate change, and also understand areas that really need our attention.

So what we do is we create really simple ecological systems, and we set them up across a range of temperatures, and then we measure things that historically haven’t been measured together. We measure the energy flux, the biomass, and we also measure the population growth and the diversity, all in the same system.

We find a lot of common patterns in the way organisms, communities, food webs respond to changes in temperature. So what that means is a little bit of warming can have a surprisingly large impact on how quickly things happen in nature.

I think looking at temperature and the ways it affects ecological systems in the way we do allows us to look at a map and projected temperature changes with climate change and start to say, okay, in these places we might be seeing accelerated function, we might be seeing more productivity. It also allows us to identify higher risk places on the planet. There are definite applications in the way that we choose to look forward into the future and plan how we’re going to interact with nature.