Collaborative Research: The Geography of Stress in the Woodfrog: Using Distributional Models to Predict the Relationship Between Population Health and Environmental Suitability

合作研究：林蛙的压力地理：利用分布模型预测种群健康与环境适宜性之间的关系

• 批准号: 1026700
• 负责人: Erica Crespi
• 金额: $ 7.5万
• 依托单位: Vassar College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-10-01 至 2011-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1026700&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Geography; Stress; Woodfrog

Investigating the patterns and processes that determine the geographic distributions of organisms is a central goal of ecology and evolutionary biology, and an understanding of these processes is essential for scientists to predict how species ranges will respond to environmental change. This study uses modern ecoinformatic databases and spatially-explicit species distributional modeling to resolve important relationships between the environment and stress. The work will include measuring physiological stress in ways that are well established in biomedical research, but until now have not been applied to natural populations within an explicit geographic context. Measures of genetic variability (e.g., inbreeding and heterozygosity) will also be measured, as previous work has shown that populations at the edge of the species range have reduced genetic variability that is associated with lower quality habitats and reduced ability to survive or adapt to changes in environmental conditions. Thus, this project will be one of the first to unify physiological, genetic, and environmental assessments of stress in wild populations. While positive correlations among risk of population extinction, inbreeding and isolation, and physiological stress are widely assumed, direct comparisons among these ecological, genetic, and physiological measures of fitness have never been directly compared. The research focuses on the wood frog as a model system because amphibians are sensitive to environmental change, and they are the most threatened group of vertebrates on the planet. The result will be a statistical assessment of the relationship between environmental quality and stress across geographic space within the range of the wood frog. The goal is to provide a toolkit of fitness indicators for conservation biologists and biogeographers to use when predicting the geography of population health to make better predictions about whether populations will persist given the threats of climate change or habitat destruction. This project aims to ground-truth a new technique that may become a useful tool in conservation biology to help assess population health and sub-lethal environmental stress in amphibians. This project provides the first integration of environmental endocrinology, population genetics, and spatially-explicit distributional modeling in a landscape-level stress assessment. This research will also enhance the education of both undergraduate and graduate students and train them to be integrative biologists who can use powerful bioinformatics databases to design studies and ask important conservation questions. Finally, in addition to research publications, presentations, and adding museum specimens to a natural history collection, a workshop on the Biogeography of Stress will be conducted to bring together research scientists, conservation biologists, and students to enhance dissemination of findings and synthesis of future directions in this field.

研究决定生物地理分布的模式和过程是生态学和进化生物学的核心目标，对这些过程的理解对于科学家预测物种范围如何应对环境变化至关重要。本研究使用现代生态信息学数据库和空间明确的物种分布模型来解决环境和压力之间的重要关系。这项工作将包括以生物医学研究中已经确立的方式测量生理压力，但到目前为止还没有应用于明确地理背景下的自然人群。遗传变异性的量度（例如，还将衡量物种多样性（近亲繁殖和杂合性），因为以往的工作表明，物种分布区边缘的种群遗传变异性降低，这与生境质量较低以及生存能力或适应环境条件变化的能力降低有关。因此，这个项目将是第一个统一的生理，遗传和环境评估的压力在野生种群。虽然人们普遍认为种群灭绝、近亲繁殖和隔离以及生理压力的风险之间存在正相关关系，但这些生态、遗传和生理适应性指标之间的直接比较从未被直接比较过。这项研究的重点是林蛙作为一个模型系统，因为两栖动物对环境变化很敏感，他们是地球上最受威胁的脊椎动物群体。其结果将是对林蛙活动范围内整个地理空间的环境质量与压力之间关系的统计评估。其目标是为保护生物学家和生态学家提供一个适应性指标工具包，用于预测种群健康的地理位置，以便更好地预测种群是否会在气候变化或栖息地破坏的威胁下持续存在。该项目的目的是地面真理的一种新技术，可能成为一个有用的工具，在保护生物学，以帮助评估人口健康和亚致死环境压力的两栖动物。该项目首次将环境内分泌学、群体遗传学和空间显式分布建模整合到一个企业级压力评估中。这项研究还将加强本科生和研究生的教育，并培养他们成为综合生物学家，他们可以使用强大的生物信息学数据库来设计研究并提出重要的保护问题。最后，除了研究出版物，演示文稿，并增加博物馆标本的自然历史收藏，将进行压力的生物地理学研讨会，汇集研究科学家，保护生物学家和学生，以加强在这一领域的研究结果和未来方向的综合传播。