This project brings together a global team to develop a powerful tool for understanding and predicting how the planet’s most sensitive and important ecosystems respond to climate change. The tool will be created with a focus on the planet’s four major upwelling regions, located off the coasts of North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. These areas of the ocean have exceptionally high levels of biological productivity, making them both ecologically and economically important. Despite their importance, we have a limited understanding of the basic biological processes that help each upwelling ecosystem function and how those processes might differ from one region to the next. This project will develop this understanding, building on cutting-edge ecological, physiological, evolutionary, and mathematical techniques, with a foundation in ground-level measurements of organisms in each region. The global team brings local knowledge for each system and the interdisciplinarity needed for a global tool that can describe these ecosystems. Valdovinos (California, USA) is an expert in theoretical ecology and food webs, Lima (Portugal) is an expert in developing technology to measure environmental temperatures, Rezende (Chile) is an expert in the physiological response of organisms to temperature and describing the evolutionary relatedness of organisms, and Hui (South Africa) is an expert in biomathematics and modeling ecological and evolutionary processes. For each upwelling region, the team will work together to describe the local food web, measure environmental temperatures and upwelling profiles, and determine how key species respond and survive stressful temperatures. These key pieces of information will be expanded to all species in each food web, based on their evolutionary history - for instance, closely related species likely have the same sensitivity to temperature. All information will be brought together in a single mathematical modelling tool to understand how the food web, with its underlying ecological processes and potential for adaptation, responds to environmental conditions. Once the tool is developed, the team can carry out unprecedented comparisons of the four upwelling regions; this can reveal unique traits and tendencies of each region and ultimately strengthen our ability to predict how each region responds to future climate scenarios.