The statement that organisms in their natural environments are subject to a multitude of environmental factors – some beneficial, some adverse and some either favorable or neutral or detrimental depending on their intensity or that of other factors – is a truism that nonetheless stresses a major challenge for ecologists. Societal needs press us to find answers to questions such as “What will be the implications of rising sea surface temperatures, acidifying oceans, increasing run-off and intensifying storms expected due to climate change on reef-building corals?” and “How will materials emerging through technological innovation, such as the rapid development of nanotechnology, compound with existing stress factors to affect organisms in their natural environment and food crops?”.

Perhaps somewhat less of a commonplace statement, a single environmental factor can have multiple physiological effects on a single organism. For instance, ocean acidification, i.e. the changes in the ocean carbonate system due to an increasing atmospheric pCO2, may have physiological impacts that are both positive, e.g. stimulating photosynthesis through CO2 enrichment, and negative, e.g. inducing pH stress and increasing the costs for calcification. As another example, toxic compounds often interfere with several organismal processes; e.g. cadmium may enhance the production of reactive oxygen species, inhibit enzymes via binding to sulfhydryl groups and cause zinc deficiencies, among other potential interferences.

Complex problems such as those outlined abovecall for an integrative metabolic theory, such as Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory, that considers a multivariate environment with stressors that are potentially interfering with several physiological processes simultaneously. I will illustrate how those kinds of complex problems can be addressed in DEB theory with various examples, including the impact of global change induced stress on marine calciferous organisms, the impact of engineered nanoparticles on the stability of symbioses of plants and nitrogen-fixing bacteria with generalized, process-based DEBtox theory.[-]