DARE

Distributed Aquatic Response Experiments

🌍A Global Call for Participation

 Aquatic ecosystems span strong environmental gradients—from marine to brackish to freshwater systems—and host an extraordinary diversity of life. Yet much of experimental ecology still relies on simplified designs, single stressors, and a limited set of model organisms. As a result, we often lack a general, mechanistic understanding of how organisms respond to environmental change across ecosystems, taxa, and levels of biological organisation.

DARE (Distributed Aquatic Response Experiments) is a global, community‑driven experimental initiative inspired our perspective Sasaki, Isanta‑Navarro & Govaert (2025). DARE directly responds to our call for experimental ecology that balances realism and feasibility by scaling up collaboration rather than complexity within single labs.

Our overarching goal is to identify general patterns in organismal performance across environmental gradients, and to link these patterns to broad ecological concepts—such as body‑size rules, life‑history strategies, and performance trade‑offs—across the full aquatic continuum. 

🧬The Idea 🔬

The Big Picture and Scientific Motivation

DARE is built around one central idea: many small, well‑designed experiments, coordinated across systems and regions, can collectively reveal large‑scale ecological patterns that no individual study can detect alone.
Rather than focusing on absolute trait values, DARE emphasizes relative responses and effect sizes—how much performance changes along environmental gradients, and how those changes compare across organisms and ecosystems. By doing so, we aim to move beyond system‑specific results towards generalizable insights into how environmental conditions shape organismal performance.
This approach allows us to:
  • Embrace ecological diversity rather than standardizing it away
  • Work across freshwater, brackish, and marine systems
  • Integrate results across taxa, life histories, and levels of organization
  • Maintain experimental feasibility while increasing realism at the network scale

What Is the Experiment About?

At its core, DARE focuses on organismal performance under environmental gradients.
Participants will expose their study organism(s) to one or more environmental stress gradients of:
  • Temperature
  • Salinity
Participation is possible with either (i) a fully factorial experiment including low and high treatment levels, or (ii) a partially factorial experiment in which a single environmental gradient is applied.
 

Response variables

DARE is intentionally flexible. You choose the response that best captures performance in your organism, for example:
  • Growth rates
  • Body size or size distributions
  • Development time
  • Reproductive output or fecundity proxies
  • Other organism‑specific performance measures
The shared focus is on relative changes across treatments, not on identical traits or absolute values.
Existing datasets that align with this framework are also welcome.
 

A Distributed, Multi‑Taxon Approach

DARE is explicitly designed as a distributed experiment, spanning:
  • Marine, brackish, and freshwater ecosystems
  • Microbes, primary producers, invertebrates, and vertebrates
  • Model and non‑model organisms
There is no single “DARE organism” or “DARE protocol.”
 
Instead, coherence emerges through shared concepts, common analytical approaches, and synthesis across diversity.
This multi‑taxon design enables us to address broad questions, such as:
  • When do different organisms show similar or contrasting performance responses?
  • How do environmental effects scale across body sizes, life histories, and ecosystems?
  • Can coordinated experiments help explain classic ecological patterns across realms?

Do you DARE? đź“Ł

Minimum expectation to participate

  • You work with at least one aquatic organism you know well
  • You can manipulate one environmental gradient relevant to your system
  • You can measure a performance‑related response
  • You are willing to contribute relative responses or effect sizes
Participation is modular: contribute one piece, or many.
 

Commitment to inclusivity

Consistent with our vision, DARE actively aims to lower barriers to participation by:
  • Supporting distributed, low‑cost experimental designs
  • Exploring small funding opportunities to support smaller labs
  • Explicitly encouraging participation from the Global South
  • Valuing existing data, partial designs, and diverse methodological approaches
Early‑career researchers are especially encouraged to join, both as contributors and as leaders of sub‑projects and syntheses.

 

Timeline

  • 2026: Network building, conceptual alignment, and method discussions
  • 2027: Distributed experimental phase across systems and regions
Researchers interested in shaping the conceptual and methodological foundation of DARE are encouraged to join early. 

Join the DARE Team! 

If you work with aquatic organisms and are interested in how environmental gradients shape organismal performance—across ecosystems, taxa, and scales—DARE is for you.

You bring your organism and your system. Together, we build a global experiment. 

Lynn Govaert, Jana Isanta-Navarro and Matthew Sasaki 

If you are interested to join please fill out this form.Â