Collaborative Research: Linking biotic interactions and environmental change to understand range dynamics of montane mammals over the past century

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Human-based activities are rapidly changing natural environments on local to global scales, calling into question the persistence of ecosystems as habitats shift and species ranges collapse or move across the landscape. Species range shift predictions are routinely based on the direct impacts of climate change alone. But this approach is widely acknowledged as overly simplistic, excluding consideration of other abiotic and biotic factors. Understanding the complex interplay between environmental change and local ecological processes is needed to improve predictions. Paired modern and historical datasets provide a means by which suites of interacting factors affecting past range responses can be modeled and validated over multiple ecological and spatial and temporal scales. This project integrates community ecology, biogeography and biogeochemistry to address the impact of a century of environmental change on small mammals in the Great Basin, a highly threatened bioregion in North America. This project underscores the value of museum collections as ecological archives and will develop a new interactive multi-media exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah to highlight new uses for old specimens in ecology and conservation. Finally, this project supports women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), as well as the interdisciplinary training of undergraduate and graduate students and a post-doctoral researcher. Using paired survey data (80+ yrs separation) in Great Basin mountains, this project will determine what factors have mediated range boundary changes of small mammals. Alternate hypotheses will be evaluated regarding how the direct and indirect effects of resource use, species interactions, landcover, and climate change at the local scale have shaped landscape-scale species range dynamics. This mechanistic understanding will be developed within and across time periods, and results synthesized to identify the traits and contexts that heighten a species' sensitivity to environmental change. Structural equation modeling will investigate direct and indirect pathways through which biotic and abiotic factors affect species occurrence and abundance at local sites and range dynamics at landscape scale. Species distribution models will be used to hindcast past species ranges in altered climates. Stable isotope analysis will be used to infer differences in diet and habitat use over time, between mountain ranges, and in the presence/absence of competitors. Mammal stable isotope analyses will be done with museum specimens. This project will facilitate the training of a post-doctoral researcher and students as well as a museum outreach exhibit. The methods and findings will be highly generalizable to other groups and systems and will generate robust and transferrable predictions of how species and communities are likely to respond to future climate and land-use scenarios. Consequently, project results will be directly relevant to conservation and management regarding the role of biotic interactions and resource requirements in mediating responses to environmental change.