Multiple stressors, such as warming and invasions, often occur together and have nonadditive effects. Most studies to date assume that stressors operate in perfect synchrony, but this will rarely be the case in reality. Stressor sequence and overlap will have implications for ecological memory – the ability of past stressors to influence future responses. Moreover, stressors are usually defined in an anthropocentric context: what we consider a short-term stressor, such as a flood, will span multiple generations of microbes. We argue that to predict responses to multiple stressors from individuals to the whole ecosystem, it is necessary to consider metabolic rates, which determine the timescales at which individuals operate and therefore, ultimately, the ecological memory at different levels of ecological organization.

多种压力源，例如变暖和入侵，经常一起发生，并且具有非累加作用。迄今为止，大多数研究都假设压力源可以完美同步地运行，但实际情况很少如此。压力源的顺序和重叠将对生态记忆产生影响，即过去的压力源影响未来反应的能力。而且，压力源通常是在以人为中心的环境中定义的：我们认为短期压力源（例如洪水）将跨越多代微生物。我们认为，要预测个体对整个生态系统对多种压力的响应，有必要考虑新陈代谢速率，新陈代谢速率决定个体活动的时间尺度，并最终决定不同生态组织水平的生态记忆。