NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2014

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NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Biology combine research and training components to prepare young scientists for careers in emerging areas where biology intersects with other scientific disciplines, in this case with mathematics and physical sciences. The Fellows are expected to lead the nation?s scientific workforce of the future. This fellowship to John A. Marino supports research and training linking empirical and theoretical approaches to study and enhance ecological inference and forecasting, with applications to critical threats facing Great Lakes fisheries. The host institutions for this fellowship are Michigan State University and the University of Michigan, and the sponsoring scientists are Drs. Scott Peacor and Edward Ionides. Training goals include learning new analytical approaches and tools. Outreach efforts includes students and also non-government organizations, the public, fisheries managers, the commercial fishing and recreation industries, and policy makers.Inference and prediction of population dynamics and species interactions are major ecological research goals, and recent methodological advances have vastly improved approaches to meet these goals. However, these methodologies have not yet been widely applied or well adapted for broad use in ecological research. This research develops an inference framework that has provided new and valuable insights in human disease for use more broadly in ecological research, especially with respect to aquatic ecosystems - fitting theoretical models of species interactions to ecological time series data. Using this approach, two critical problems affecting fisheries in the Laurentian Great Lakes are addressed: invasive species and global climate change. Specifically, the project examines hypothesized interactive effects on important prey fishes of two potential stresses: two major invasive species (dreissenid mussels and the spiny water flea, Bythotrephes longimanus), and the joint effects of the water flea and climate change.