Behavioral Ecological Insights into Organismal Responses to Anthropogenic Environmental Change: A Multi-Stress Perspective

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Background

Anthropogenic activities are driving unprecedented rates of environmental change, via global climate change, widespread urbanization and chemical pollution. These environmental changes are introducing multiple, novel stressors into ecosystems, for instance including chemical contaminants and artificial light at night, while also modifying stressors that have long been of central ecological importance, including predation pressure and resource shortage. Multiple stressors are likely to have additive and interactive effects. For example, global climate change and anthropogenic contaminants are having joint effects on marine biota in the arctic, which is warming at an alarming rate and serves as a sink for diverse pollutants. Behavioral and physiological plasticity serve as primary mechanisms whereby organisms might be able to adaptively adjust to new stress regimes. However, multi-stress environments also have the potential to overwhelm organismal coping mechanisms, especially if certain stressors, such as contaminants, impair adaptive behavioral and physiological responses.

Anthropogenic environmental change is currently unprecedentedly rapid and pervasive. Hence, understanding the capacity for organisms to adjust to this change is an urgent research objective. The goal of this Research Topic is to move towards a behavioral ecological understanding of organismal responses to modified, multi-stress environments associated with rapid anthropogenic environmental change. Can organisms adaptively adjust to rapidly changing environments through behavioral and physiological plasticity, or do maladaptive behavioral patterns emerge in modified environments? How do the multiple stressors associated with rapid anthropogenic environmental change interact, and to what extent does concurrent exposure to multiple stressors overwhelm or impair organismal coping mechanisms? For example, are organisms exposed to anthropogenic contaminants less able to adopt new foraging patterns when confronted with climate change-associated shifts in resource distribution? We would particularly like to encourage research regarding how concepts currently central to basic behavioral ecological research, for example including animal personality variation, cognitive ecology, social information exchange, and ecological traps, can be applied to understand animal responses to multiple stressors in rapidly changing environments. Moreover, we would like to highlight how detailed behavioral data derived from state-of-the-art biologging techniques can be applied to understand behavioral responses of free-living animals to anthropogenic environmental change.

We encourage studies that explore behavioral ecological aspects of organismal responses to anthropogenic environmental change, especially within a multi-stress framework. Topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

- Behavioral and physiological responses to multiple, climate change-associated stressors
- Behavioral ecotoxicological studies involving interactions between contaminants and other stressors, such as climate change-associated stressors
- How novel anthropogenic stressors interact with other environmental stressors to affect behavior
- How interactions between multiple urban-associated stressors (e.g. noise and light pollution) affect behavior and physiology
- Interactions between multiple anthropogenic stressors and animal personality variation
- Roles of cognition and social information in allowing animals to cope with multiple stressors

Keywords: behavioral, ecological, ecophysiological, multi-stress, anthropogenic stressors

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