Doctoral Dissertation Research: Effects of anthropogenic habitat fragmentation on primate movement patterns and dispersal

在过去的几千年里，人类向热带森林的扩张，以及相关的景观转变为森林、农业和城市栖息地的拼凑，对灵长类动物种群产生了负面影响，并导致人类与野生、非人类灵长类动物之间的直接冲突增加。然而，尽管有这么长的接触历史，人类（人为）因素对灵长类动物进化轨迹的影响尚不完全清楚。该项目将研究人为破碎景观如何影响野生银棕色绢毛猴种群的基因流动、遗传结构和功能连通性。银棕色绢毛猴是哥伦比亚北部里约热内卢Magdalena山谷的一种极具魅力的濒危灵长类动物。这项研究将加强美国和哥伦比亚研究人员之间的长期国际合作，并有助于加强研究人员、当地社区和国家环境公司之间的关系，这将进一步支持这种濒危灵长类动物的保护。它还将为女性研究生和本科生提供研究、培训和指导机会，从而促进和吸引代表性不足的选区更多地参与STEM学科。绢毛猴是一种小体猴，世代时间相对较短，在它们的地理范围内，它们受到持续的人为景观变化的影响。与此同时，它们在人类改造的栖息地中表现出高度的流动性和生存能力，这使得它们与人类共享空间，使它们成为理解栖息地碎片化进化后果的理想模型。利用下一代基因组技术，该项目将对数十只绢毛猴个体的核基因组中的数万个标记进行分类，以确定自然和人为因素如何共同形成景观水平上的遗传变异模式。这将是第一个对野生灵长类动物种群结构的基因组研究之一，也是第一个明确研究人类引起的栖息地变化的影响的研究之一。遗传数据和结果将通过科学杂志和专题报告传播，并将提供给环境机构，以便今后执行养护行动。

Over the past several thousand years, human expansion into tropical forests and the associated transformation of landscapes into patchworks of forested, agricultural, and urban habitats has had a negative impact on primate populations and led to increases in direct conflict between humans and wild, nonhuman primates. However, despite this long history of contact, the influence of human (anthropogenic) factors on primate evolutionary trajectories is not fully understood. This project will examine how anthropogenically-fragmented landscapes affect gene flow, genetic structure, and functional connectivity among wild populations of the silvery-brown tamarin, a charismatic and endangered primate from the Rio Magdalena valley in northern Colombia. The study will strengthen long-term international collaborations between US and Colombian researchers and help bolster relationships between researchers, the local community, and the state environmental corporation, which will further support the conservation of this endangered primate. It will also provide research, training, and mentorship opportunities for a female graduate student and undergraduates, thereby promoting and engaging greater participation of underrepresented constituencies in STEM disciplines.Tamarins are small-bodied monkeys with relatively short generation times, and across their geographic range they are subject to ongoing anthropogenic landscape changes. At the same time, they show a high degree of mobility and ability to survive in human-modified habitats, resulting in their sharing space with humans and making tamarins ideal models for understanding the evolutionary consequences of habitat fragmentation. Using next-generation genomic techniques, this project will type tens of thousands of markers from across the nuclear genome for dozens of individual tamarins to determine how natural and anthropogenic factors together shape patterns of genetic variation at the landscape level. This will be one of the first genomic studies of population structure in wild primates and one of the first to explicitly examine the effects of human-induced habitat change. The genetic data and results will be disseminated through scientific journals and presentations and will be given to environmental agencies for future implementation of conservation actions.