NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2017: Historical Dynamics of Native Ant Communities of the Southeastern U.S.: Community Responses to Invasion by Exotic Ant Species

这是一个NSF博士后研究奖学金在生物学，根据程序研究使用生物收集。这位名叫道格·布赫（Doug Booher）的研究员正在进行研究并接受培训，以创新的方式利用生物收藏品，并由两个主办机构的两位赞助科学家指导：科里·莫罗（菲尔德自然历史博物馆）和安德鲁·苏亚雷斯（伊利诺伊大学）。该研究员的研究旨在描述和解释随着非本地物种的到来和传播，本地物种的丰度，分布和多样性的变化。人为造成的非本土动植物迁移正在以前所未有的速度在地球仪上迁移物种。这些引进的物种是第二大灭绝原因。因此，了解入侵物种在不同时间尺度上对生态群落的影响是生态学研究的一个重要问题。在佛罗里达，239种蚂蚁中约有25%是非本地物种，其中约一半是在过去35年中引入的。这位研究员正在评估入侵蚂蚁物种的影响，使用过去几十年在佛罗里达收集的非常大的地理范围广泛的蚂蚁群落集合，并辅之以博物馆藏品中较早的记录。除了追求这些研究兴趣之外，该研究员还参与了针对小学年龄儿童的公共推广计划，并通过综合生物学实习计划培养未来的科学家，同时在菲尔德博物馆和伊利诺伊大学进行研究。这项研究在利用现有博物馆藏品方面有两个主要目标：（1）研究入侵物种的长期命运和入侵后本地群落的动态变化，以检验群落组装的竞争假说，即中性组装与生态位组装;（2）评估7个特征的重要性，这些特征被假设为解释入侵物种的生态成功。假设赋予竞争成功的特征是连续繁殖，一夫多妻制，supercoloniality，杂食性，栖息地的一般性，巢机会主义，和工人的多态性。为了这些目标，研究员将在两个系统发育尺度上研究群落动态：在粗略的系统发育尺度上，所有蚂蚁的群落，以及在更精细的系统发育尺度上，同类蚂蚁的群落。在佛罗里达，有五个常见和/或不同的蚂蚁属与本地和非本地的代表物种。这将允许蚂蚁群落动态的遗传学控制的统计比较，其中这些群落的成员更有可能在生活史和生态特征上重叠，由于共同的祖先。一旦数字化，这项研究的收集数据将通过Antweb.org公开提供。作为来自单一地区的最大和最长的蚂蚁时间序列收集之一，这些数据将对社区生态学家，入侵生态学家，害虫管理科学家，进化生物学家，生物多样性科学家，气候科学家和保护主义者非常宝贵。

This is an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, under the program Research Using Biological Collections. The fellow, Doug Booher, is conducting research and receiving training that utilizes biological collections in innovative ways, and is being mentored by two sponsoring scientists at two host institutions: Corrie Moreau (Field Museum of Natural History) and Andrew Suarez (University of Illinois). The fellow's research aims to describe and explain the changes in the abundance, distribution, and diversity of native species as non-native species arrived and spread. Human-caused transport of non-native plants and animals is moving species at unprecedented rates across the globe. These introduced species are the second leading cause of extinctions. Therefore, understanding how invasive species impact ecological communities over different time scales is a major question in ecological research. In Florida, approximately 25% of 239 ant species are non-native and about half these introductions happened in the last 35 years. The fellow is assessing the impact of invasive ant species, using very large and geographically extensive collections of ant communities collected in Florida over the past several decades, supplemented by older records in museum collections. In addition to pursuing these research interests, the fellow is engaging in public outreach programs for grade-school age children as well as training future scientists through integrative biology internship programs while conducting research at Field Museum and the University of Illinois.This research has two main objectives in using available museum collections: (1) to investigate the long-term fates of invasive species and the corresponding dynamics of native communities after invasion to test competing hypotheses of community assembly i.e. neutral vs. niche assembly; and (2) to evaluate the importance of seven traits hypothesized to explain the ecological success of invasive species. Traits hypothesized to confer competitive success are continuous reproduction, polygyny, supercoloniality, omnivory, habitat generality, nest opportunism, and worker polymorphism. For these objectives, the fellow will investigate community dynamics at two phylogenetic scales: at a coarse phylogenetic scale, communities of all ants, and at a finer phylogenetic scale, communities of congeneric ants. In Florida, there are five common and/or diverse ant genera with native and non-native representative species. This will allow for a phylogenetically controlled statistical comparisons of ant community dynamics where members of these communities are more likely to overlap in life history and ecological traits due to shared ancestry. Once digitized, the collections data of this research will be publicly available through Antweb.org. As one of the largest and longest time series collections of ants from a single region, these data will be invaluable to community ecologist, invasive ecologists, pest management scientist, evolutionary biologist, biodiversity scientists, climate scientists, and conservationist.