Scaling Sarracenia in North America 1900-2100

Scaling in Ecology with a Model System synthesizes central theories from ecology, biogeography, and macroecology through the lens of scale and scaling across spatiotemporal extents and grains, levels of biological organization, and with dimensionless ratios. In this book, we link 25 years of detailed natural history observations and laboratory and field experiments on the “Sarracenia microecosystem” (the northern pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, and its associated food web of microbes and macrobes) with new models and analyses to generate novel insights into ecophysiology and stoichiometry; demography and species distribution models; food webs and trophic dynamics; and tipping points and regime shifts. Our work addresses the Sarracenia microecosystem at a hierarchy of spatial scales: individual pitchers within plants, plants within bogs, and bogs within landscapes, all of which can be treated as replicate “island” ecosystems that can be studied throughout the United States east of the Mississippi River and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains. Through integrated studies of its proteomics, physiology, population dynamics, community ecology, and ecosystem processes, the Sarracenia microecosystem has emerged as a model system for experimental ecology. Our synthetic work clearly illustrates that working with the Sarracenia microecosystem can yield new results and understanding of the importance of ecosystem-wide disturbances and anthropogenically-driven environmental and climatic change. They also show that research with the experimentally tractable Sarracenia microecosystem proceeds much more rapidly than studies of larger, more slowly changing ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, lakes, and streams that are more difficult to replicate and experimentally manipulate.