NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology for FY 2011

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2011, Broadening Participation. The fellowship supports a research and training plan in a host laboratory for the Fellow who also presents a plan to broaden participation in biology. The title of the research and training plan for this fellowship to Rudolf von May is "Habitat shifts and physiology of high-elevation Andean frogs." The host institution for the fellowship is the University of California, Berkeley and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Craig Moritz.In a rapidly changing world, many species are faced with shrinking native habitat, expanding new habitats, and novel climatic conditions. Tropical montane regions are of special concern because they are centers of unique biodiversity. While much attention has been given to modeling and predicting habitat-related range shifts in montane organisms, especially in the context of climate change, the underlying evolutionary factors and mechanisms of response to habitat change remain poorly understood. This research is improving our understanding of the evolutionary history of Andean frogs and explaining how major shifts in habitat are also influenced by physiological attributes and distributions of related taxa. It maps the distributions of ground-breeding frogs within forested and open habitats across elevations, tracing habitat preferences using an existing phylogeny constructed with molecular genetic data. Empirical data on physiological characteristics including thermal tolerance, desiccation tolerance, and locomotion of sister taxa pairs are being collected for species distribution modeling to gain insights of current and past species distributions and to improve predictions on future distributions. Training objectives include molecular systematics, phylogeography, physiology, and species distribution modeling. Broader impacts include capacity-building and advanced training for minority students from the United States, students in Latin America, and an outreach program to promote ecological literacy about local and tropical biodiversity. Outreach focuses on developing a science education partnership with local teachers. The teaching option includes a short course on tropical ecology and evolution for undergraduate students from universities in the US and Peru.