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: 1134687
• 负责人: Erica Crespi
• 金额: $ 7.5万
• 依托单位: Washington State University
• 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: 2010-12-31 至 2014-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1134687&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中心目标，对这些过程的理解对于科学家预测物种范围如何响应环境变化至关重要。本研究使用现代生态信息学数据库和空间显式物种分布模型来解决环境与压力之间的重要关系。这项工作将包括用生物医学研究中已经确立的方法来测量生理压力，但到目前为止还没有应用于明确地理背景下的自然种群。遗传变异的测量（例如近亲繁殖和杂合）也将被测量，因为先前的工作已经表明，在物种范围边缘的种群减少了遗传变异，而遗传变异与较低质量的栖息地和生存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，遗传和环境评估野生种群的压力。虽然人们普遍认为种群灭绝风险、近亲繁殖和隔离与生理应激之间存在正相关关系，但这些生态、遗传和生理适应度指标之间的直接比较从未被直接比较过。由于两栖动物对环境变化非常敏感，而且它们是地球上最受威胁的脊椎动物，因此研究重点将林蛙作为模型系统。结果将是对林蛙活动范围内的环境质量与地理空间压力之间关系的统计评估。目标是为保护生物学家和生物地理学家提供一个健康指标工具包，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。该项目旨在为一项可能成为保护生物学有用工具的新技术打下基础，以帮助评估两栖动物种群健康和亚致死环境压力。该项目首次将环境内分泌学、种群遗传学和空间显式分布模型整合到景观水平的压力评估中。这项研究也将加强本科生和研究生的教育，培养他们成为能够利用强大的生物信息学数据库设计研究和提出重要保护问题的综合生物学家。最后，除了研究出版物、演讲和增加博物馆标本到自然历史收藏之外，还将举办一个关于压力生物地理学的研讨会，汇集研究科学家、保护生物学家和学生，以加强研究成果的传播和该领域未来发展方向的综合。