Star: the functional consequences of community-environment disequilibria

The National Science Foundation awarded Utah State University $399,995 on September 1, 2026, under the Biological Sciences program (CFDA 47.074) to investigate how community-environment disequilibrium—the mismatch between ecological communities and their changing physical environment—affects ecosystem functions and services.

The research addresses the gap between rapid environmental change and slower adaptation of longer-lived organisms, which creates novel ecosystem combinations whose functional outcomes remain difficult to predict. Using existing datasets, the project tests whether community-environment disequilibrium impacts three critical ecosystem services: primary productivity, invasion resistance, and pollination services. The work will generate data and insights for natural resource managers planning adaptation strategies as community-environment mismatches become larger and more common, while contributing to scientific workforce development.

Performance takes place in Logan, Utah, with a period of performance from September 1, 2026, through August 31, 2028.

Abstract

How do changes in the environment alter the distribution and abundance of endangered species, invasive species, or disease-spreading organisms? Will the benefits of nature for people, such as livestock forage or crop pollination, increase or decrease? The crux of this challenge is that many important components of ecosystems will change very slowly, more slowly than the environment is changing, leading to combinations of plants, animals, microbes, and soils never seen before. How these novel ecosystems will function is very hard to predict. The goal of this research is to better understand how ecosystems function when plants and pollinators are poorly matched to a changed environment. Will such ecosystems fix less carbon, be more vulnerable to biological invasions, or provide decreased pollination services? The project will benefit society by helping natural resource managers plan for a future in which community-environment mismatches are larger and more common and by contributing to the development of the scientific workforce. Recent research has shown that communities of short-lived organisms are changing at the same pace as the environment, but communities of longer-lived organisms are lagging behind. Such lags increase community-environment disequilibrium, the difference between the environment to which the community is best suited versus the ambient one. However, existing research has not considered a critical question: what are the consequences of community-environment disequilibria for ecosystem functions and services? The proposed research will use novel combinations of existing datasets to test the hypothesis that community-environment disequilibrium impacts three critical ecosystem functions and services: primary productivity, invasion resistance, and pollination services. Data and results of this research may have important, but unexplored, applications in natural resource management. To develop these applications, the project will engage with natural resource management agency personnel focused on adaptation to a changing environment. A series of online workshops will lead to a peer-reviewed paper discussing applications of community-environment disequilibrium in natural resource management planning and a practitioner guide for exploiting data generated by this project. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.- subawards are not planned for this award.