Ecosystem services are the varied goods and benefits provided by ecosystems that make human life possible. This concept has fostered scientific explorations of the services that nature provides to people with the goal of sustaining those services for future generations. As the world becomes increasingly urban, ecosystems are reshaped, and services are degraded. Provisioning and regulating ecosystem services, landscape planning, decision making, and agricultural systems and technologies play a distinctive role in feeding and sustaining the expanding urban population. Hence, the integrated assessment of these coupled components is necessary to understand food security and sustainable development. Nevertheless, frameworks that incorporate ecosystem services, urbanization, and human wellbeing are still scarce due to several conceptual and methodological gaps that challenge this assessment. As a consequence, these frameworks are not operationalized, and ecosystem services rarely receive proper attention in decision making. This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of the role of ecosystem services at the landscape level and provides an approach for operationalizing decisions that affect sustainable practices and human wellbeing.

With effective engineering using synthetic biology approaches, plant-based platforms could conceivably be designed to minimize the production costs and wastes of high-value products such as medicines, biofuels, and chemical feedstocks that would otherwise be uneconomical. Additionally, modern agricultural crops could be engineered to be more productive, resilient, or restorative in different or rapidly changing environments and climates. To achieve these complex goals, information-processing genetic devices and circuits containing multiple interacting parts that behave predictably must be developed. A genetic Boolean AND logic gate is a device that computes the presence or absence of two inputs (signals, stimuli) and produces an output (response) only if both inputs are present. Here, we optimized individual genetic components and used synthetic protein heterodimerizing domains to rationally assemble genetic AND logic gates that integrate two hormonal inputs in whole plants. These AND gates produce an output only in the presence of both abscisic acid and auxin, but not when either or neither hormone is present. Furthermore, we demonstrate the AND gate can also integrate two plant stresses, cold temperature and bacterial infection, to produce a specific response. The design principles used here are generalizable, and therefore multiple orthogonal AND gates could be assembled and rationally …

Oil spills are well-known adverse anthropogenic events, as they can induce severe impacts on the environment and negative economic consequences. Still, much remains to be learned regarding the effects of crude oil exposure to aquatic organisms. The objectives of this dissertation were to fill some of those knowledge gaps by examining the effects of Deepwater Horizon (DWH) crude oil exposure on teleost kidney development and function. To this end, I analyzed how these effects translate into potential osmoregulatory impairments and investigated the interactive effects of ubiquitous natural factors, such as dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and ultraviolet (UV) light, on acute crude oil toxicity. Results demonstrated that acute early life stage (ELS) crude oil exposure induces developmental defects to the primordial kidney in teleost fish (i.e., the pronephros) as evident by alterations in: (1) transcriptional responses of key genes involved in pronephros development and function and (2) alterations in pronephros morphology. Crude oil-exposed zebrafish (Danio rerio) larvae presented defective pronephric function characterized by reduced renal clearance capacity and altered filtration selectivity, factors that likely contributed to the formation of edema. Latent osmoregulatory implications of crude oil exposure during ELS were observed in red drum (Sciaenops ocellatus) larvae, which manifested reduced survival …

The estuarine sheepshead minnow (Cyprinodon variegatus) is the most eurythermic fish species, with a thermal tolerance window between 0.6°C and 45.1°C. However, little is known about the physiological mechanisms that allow this species to survive this temperature range. In order to understand how sheepshead minnow physiology is affected by temperature acclimation and acute changes in temperature, I conducted research on this species using a multi-level approach. I began at the organismal level, and examined the effects of these temperature changes on the sheepshead minnow's metabolic rate and swimming performance. The next chapter investigated the effects of changing temperatures on cardiac function (i.e., tissue/organ specific effects). In the final chapter, I conducted research at the sub-cellular level, and determined how mitochondrial bioenergetics / function is impacted by changing temperatures. This research shows that while sheepshead minnows are able to sustain heart function and mitochondrial respiration over a broad range of temperatures; they also display a plastic temperature response which is associated with the downregulation of standard metabolic rate and cardiac remodeling to maintain force generation. Collectively, these physiological responses may contribute to the sheepshead minnow's ability to maintain physiological and organismal function across a large temperature range.