Collaborative Research: Life in a Changing Environment

环境变化是人类起源主要理论的基石。适应环境的变化--几十年来的季节性、随机性和方向性--也是稀树大草原狒狒的一个关键特征，这是一种分布广泛的大型非人类灵长类动物，与人类有许多共同的特征。目前的调查将集中在安博塞利的狒狒种群，这一种群在过去几十年中经历了广泛的环境变化，并在这种环境变化面前一直存在。行为是当前研究的核心，在适应环境变化方面发挥着关键作用。它对维持内部稳定有直接的、短期的影响，对个人的生活和人口的进化轨迹也有深远的长期影响。当前的项目将评估和测试关于环境变化的行为和生理后果的预测，以及关于环境变化对出生率和死亡率的影响的预测。还将利用新应用的统计方法与遗传标记相结合，对研究人群中的基因流动模式进行估计。通过将人口、行为、环境、遗传和荷尔蒙数据纳入一个综合框架，这项工作将服务于几个特定的目标。(1)它将提供关于环境变化如何影响健康组成部分和相关特征的详细信息。(2)它将阐明个人在多大程度上受到环境变化的不同影响并对其做出反应。这将为在面对环境变化时赋予适应性优势的特征提供重要的洞察力。(3)它将提供有关短期环境变化的影响以及经历这种变化的物种的种群结构的重要信息。(4)它将提供有关生物体如何适应环境变化的重要数据。在当前快速的人为气候变化时期，这与生物保护高度相关。这个项目本质上是跨学科的，这是必要的，也是设计的。它将利用和加强一系列社会科学和生物科学中的概念、数据和技术的整合。该项目将极大地扩展研究人员培训美国和肯尼亚学生的悠久历史--培训活动与研究目标密切相关。最近的人力资源开发侧重于培训6名博士后研究员、7名博士后候选人(其中2名是肯尼亚人)、3名理科硕士。学生(其中2名是肯尼亚人)、24名本科生(包括5名非裔美国人和3名西班牙裔妇女)和1名高中生。调查员还积极与4名肯尼亚科学家合作，并与他们合作开展相关的国内能力建设活动。拟议的互访和在肯尼亚举行的工作组会议将进一步推进这些目标，并为产生持久影响奠定更加坚实的基础。该项目还将扩大调查人员的活动，以加强基础设施和传播成果。PIs是首批改进和应用非侵入性技术以获取和利用遗传和激素样本的公司之一，出于伦理、科学和监管方面的原因，这些技术在世界范围内越来越重要。此外，调查人员在过去几年的一项主要任务是设计和实施一个全面的数据库，其中包括与长期狒狒项目相关的许多不同的数据集。应其他科学家的要求，数据库设计已被分享给其他一些科学家。此外，还为他们的实地研究项目开发了一个网站(www.princeton.edu/~Baboon)，作为向公众、从K到研究生的学生和同事提供信息和数据的工具。

Environmental change is a cornerstone of major theories of human origins. Adaptation to environmental variability--seasonal, random, and directional over decades--is also a key feature of savanna baboons, a large, widespread species of non-human primates that shares many features with humans. The current investigations will focus on the baboon population of Amboseli, a population that has experienced extensive environmental change over the past several decades for which information is available, and that has persisted in the face of this environmental change. Behavior, the centerpiece of the current investigations, plays a pivotal role in adaptation to environmental variability. It has both immediate, short-term consequences for maintaining internal stability and profound long-term consequences for the lives of individuals and for the evolutionary trajectories of populationsThe current project will evaluate and test predictions about behavioral and physiological consequences of environmental change, and about the effects of environmental change on birth and death rates. Estimates of gene flow patterns in the study population will also be developed using newly applied statistical methods in combination with genetic markers. By incorporating demographic, behavioral, environmental, genetic, and hormonal data in an integrative framework, the work will serve several specific goals. (1) It will provide detailed information on how environmental change affects fitness components and related traits. (2) It will elucidate the extent to which individuals are differentially affected by, and respond to, environmental change. This will provide important insight into traits that confer an adaptive advantage in the face of environmental change. (3) It will provide important information on the impact of short time-scale environmental change, and on the population structure of a species experiencing such change. (4) It will provide vital data on how organisms adapt to environmental change. This is highly relevant for biological conservation in the current period of rapid, anthropogenic climate change. This project is, of necessity and design, intrinsically interdisciplinary. It will both utilize and enhance integration of concepts, data, and techniques across a range of social and biological sciences. This project will greatly expand the investigators' long history of training American and Kenyan students-training activities that are intimately connected with the research goals. Recent human resource development has focused on training for 6 post-doctoral fellows, 7 Ph.D. candidates (2 of them Kenyan), 3 M.Sc. students (2 of them Kenyan), 24 undergraduates (including 5 African-Americans and 3 Hispanic women), and 1 high school student. The investigators also actively collaborate with 4 Kenyan scientists and are working with them on relevant in-country capacity-building activities. Proposed exchange visits and a working group meeting in Kenya will further advance these goals and lay an even more solid base for enduring impact. The project will also extend the investigators' activities toward enhancement of infrastructure and dissemination of results. The PIs are among the first to refine and apply non-invasive techniques for obtaining and utilizing genetic and hormonal samples, techniques that are of increasing importance worldwide for ethical, scientific, and regulatory reasons. In addition, a major task of the investigators in the past few years has been to design and implement a comprehensive database that includes the many diverse data sets associated with the long-term baboon project. The database design has been shared with a number of other scientists upon request. In addition, a website has been developed for their field research project (www.princeton.edu/~baboon), which serves as a vehicle for providing information and data to the public, students from K through post-graduate, and colleagues.