Collaborative Research: RAPID: Linking Population and Community Ecology in Restored Communities: Interactions Between Species Diversity and Genetic Diversity

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Understanding how landscapes change following human disturbance is increasingly important. Large portions of the Northeastern and Midwestern parts of the US were formerly cleared of native vegetation to support agriculture, and many of the resulting farms were subsequently abandoned. This cycle of modification and abandonment continues. This project will capitalize on planned restoration of abandoned agricultural land in Michigan to establish long-term experiments. These experiments can be used by diverse researchers, including the investigators on this project, to understand how native communities and native biodiversity are restored. The research will engage citizens who are active in butterfly, bird, and plant monitoring programs, along with local K-12 teachers, undergraduate students, and graduate students. The project will strengthen a collaboration among research scientists, the Michigan Division of Natural Resources, and local land owners, who will be engaged in project development. Results from the study, including the experimental plots, will be used as exemplars for future community and private land restoration efforts. The relationship between species diversity and community and ecosystem processes is of fundamental importance in the fields of community and ecosystem ecology. Recent research includes genetic diversity and its influence through potential feedbacks between genetic and species diversity. The large-scale and long-term experimental manipulations that will be established through this project will provide a unique testing ground for understanding the relationships between species and genetic diversity and how these aspects of biodiversity affect population, community, ecosystem, and evolutionary processes under realistic field conditions. To date, most studies have been small in scale and short in duration. Twelve former agricultural fields will be restored to native prairie and experiments will be established that manipulate both species and genetic diversity. This is a unique opportunity to overlay experimental treatments on large-scale restoration. Short-term results will test questions about how genetic diversity affects species diversity in newly assembling communities and how species and genetic diversity interact to affect the establishment, growth, and extinction of focal populations. Although rarely applied in genetic diversity-species diversity work, population demography and evolutionary ecology approaches hold great promise for identifying mechanistic links driving feedbacks between genetic diversity and species diversity. Over the longer-term these experiments will be available to diverse researchers to pursue wide-ranging ecological questions.