CAREER: Museum-based Approaches to Ecology and Evolution of Aquatic Systems: An Integrated Research and Educational Program

这个项目将在新墨西哥大学的西南生物博物馆(MSB)建立一个研究、教育和培训项目。参与的研究生和本科生将对自然历史收藏如何获得、记录和保存标本有一个基本的了解，以提供我们丰富的自然遗产的历史记录。然后，学生将在两个研究目标中使用这些知识和鱼类分部保存的博物馆标本收藏，该分部跨越65年的历史，旨在确定濒危的格兰德河水生生态系统鱼类动物生态变化的根本原因。首先，将使用稳定同位素方法比较现在和博物馆保存的鱼类标本，以确定鱼类群落在过去(在人口增长和大规模调水之前)的功能是否与现在不同。这项研究旨在确定可能改变了格兰德河鱼类群落动态的生态系统范围内的事件。其次，某些鱼类物种的丰度模式将利用收集进行评估，并与目前对遗传多样性的估计进行比较，以确定丰度降低是否以阻碍物种恢复的方式改变了遗传多样性。这两项研究都集中在保护和修复格兰德河的重要问题上。自然历史收藏对于记录和了解地球上生物多样性的变化变得越来越重要，因为它们保存了生物多样性的历史记录。此外，自然历史收藏还被用来解决人类健康中的重要问题，如汉坦病毒在西南沙漠的起源和出现。然而，在本科生和研究生培养之间存在着根本的差距，自然历史收藏可以为解决重要问题提供巨大的资源。这个项目的目标是通过让研究生和本科生熟悉自然历史博物馆提供的各种信息来缩小这一差距，并向他们展示如何使用多学科研究方法将这些信息用于关键的环境问题。其预期结果是培养出能够以新颖的方式利用自然历史博物馆提供的巨大资源来解决我们在21世纪面临的环境问题的科学家。

AbstractThis project will create a research, education, and training program in the Museum of Southwestern Biology (MSB) at the University of New Mexico. Participating graduate and undergraduate students will gain a fundamental understanding of how natural history collections acquire, document, and database specimens, to provide an historical record of our rich natural heritage. Students will then use this knowledge and a collection of museum specimens held in the Division of Fishes that spans a 65-year history in two research objectives aimed at identifying the underlying causes of ecological change in the fish fauna of the imperiled Rio Grande aquatic ecosystem. First, stable isotope methodology will be used to compare present-day and museum-preserved fish specimens, to determine whether the fish community functioned differently in the past (prior to human population growth and large-scale water diversion) than at present. This research is designed to identify ecosystem-wide events that may have altered fish community dynamics in the Rio Grande. Second, abundance patterns of certain fish species will be evaluated using the collection and compared to current estimates of genetic diversity to ascertain whether reduced abundance has changed genetic diversity in ways that hamper species recovery. Both research efforts are focused on important issues for conservation and restoration of the Rio Grande.Natural history collections are becoming increasingly important for documenting and understanding the changes in biodiversity on the planet because they preserve an historical record of organismal diversity. Moreover, natural history collections have been used to address important issues in human health such as the origins and emergence of Hantavirus in the desert southwest. There exists, however, a fundamental gap between undergraduate and graduate training and the enormous resources that natural history collections can offer for solving important problems. The goal of this project is to close that gap by familiarizing graduate and undergraduate students with the kinds of information available in natural history museums, and to show them how this information can be brought to bear on critical environmental problems using a multidisciplinary research approach. The intended result is to produce scientists that can capitalize on the vast resources offered by natural history museums in novel ways to solve environmental problems facing us in the 21st century.