Collaborative Research: Range Limits and Their Response to Environmental Change: Experiments and Stochastic Models

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Although the distribution of every species is limited to a particular range, the fundamental ecological processes that determine species' range boundaries are not understood well enough to predict how species will respond to environmental change. This project will investigate three overarching questions. First, what determines range limits? Second, how variable are range limits and what factors determine this variability? Third, how do range limits respond to environmental change? That is, how quickly do they respond and how predictable or variable are their responses given the inherent variability arising from random population processes? These questions will be addressed using a laboratory based experimental system together with mathematical and statistical modeling.Understanding what sets range limits and their variability is vital for understanding and forecasting how species will respond to climate change and to increasing variability in climate. This understanding is also vital for the management of species - both those that are undesirable and those that are endangered. Only a combination of manipulative experiments and mathematical modeling will yield the understanding needed by society over the available time before action is required. This approach has the additional benefit of providing real interdisciplinary training and experience for both graduate and undergraduate students, and plans are presented to include more than 40 undergraduate and 2 graduate students in the research. Both investigators have strong records of recruiting undergraduate assistants from groups typically underrepresented in biological research.