REU Site: Biological impacts of climate change: testing hypotheses with collections and long-term data

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A Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Sites award has been made to the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) to provide research training for eight students for eight weeks during the summers of 2013-2015. Climate change, the overriding environmental issue of our time, causes drastic changes in the distributions and abundances of many species and potentially threatens peoples' ways of life. This REU will train students to use critical tools to understand mechanisms underlying biological responses to climate change, including: 1) physiological/ecological limits of species; 2) changes in species' interactions; and 3) hypothesis testing that enables one to discriminate between climate change and other natural or anthropogenic factors affecting species diversity and geographical distributions. Students will work on a diversity of organisms, systems, and specific questions guided by mentors from UCSC's Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Dept. of Environmental Studies, and several regional organizations. The common threads among projects include 1) testing hypotheses; 2) assembling long-term data sets from museums and faculty research; 3) measuring key physiological/behavioral traits or ecological interactions; 4) predicting changes in species' distributions and/or ecosystems based on future climate scenarios; and 5) conducting field work to ground-truth their predictions. This REU will select and train 24 undergraduates, including many minority students, based on their academic records and research potential. All students will be mentored to help them improve communication skills, discover resources for their education and careers, and recognize and value their own contributions to science. The REU program includes talks, discussions and workshops on methods and concepts key to their projects, and relevant field trips. These students will also join with an existing UCSC undergraduate research program targeting minority students in STEM disciplines for workshops on scientific ethics and communication. Students will be tracked to determine their continued interest in science, career paths, and lasting influences of their REU experience. The program will be assessed by various means, including an REU common assessment tool. More information is available by visiting http://reu.eeb.ucsc.edu/, or by contacting the PI (Dr. Barry Sinervo at lizardrps@gmail.com) or the co-PI (Dr. Laurel Fox at fox@ucsc.edu).