CREST-PRF: Utilizing innovative 3D reconstruction techniques to enhance our understanding of the biology and ecology of Hawaiian ecosystems

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The Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology-Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (CREST-PRF) track within the CREST program supports beginning CREST Center investigators with significant potential and provides them with training and research experiences that will broaden perspectives, facilitate interdisciplinary interactions and establish them in positions of leadership within the scientific community. This CREST-PRF project is aligned with the research focus of the CREST Center for Tropical Conservation Biology and Environmental Science (CREST-TCBES) at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. Communities in the tropics and subtropics depend on the economical, ecological, and cultural services provided by terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Recent research has provided evidence that Hawaiian ecosystems are exhibiting signs of reduced health and disease, a scenario likely related to rapid development in the Hawaiian Islands. This project will improve the capability of studying the impacts of disturbance and stressors on habitat structure and critical ecological processes by creating high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) habitat reconstructions of both marine and terrestrial ecosystems across a gradient of disturbance regimes. This work will promote the progress of science and help preserve valuable ecosystem services that affect the prosperity and welfare of humans. K-12 students and local communities will be engaged in this project to support education and diversity. Interactive data visualizations and immersive virtual reality technologies will be hosted online to captivate audiences while providing educational material. This study will provide new outreach products designed to engage global audiences and broaden participation in science. This project will apply innovative techniques to advance ecological and biological research by collating 3D reconstruction, molecular characterization, bioinformatics, and statistical modeling. The research goals of this project aim to characterize the molecular profiles of eukaryote-prokaryote symbioses and address fundamental questions about how environmental change affects ecological systems at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The research methods will integrate 3D structure-from-motion reconstruction technology and data visualization tools to provide a new context for which to decipher patterns and relationships occurring in both molecular and ecological processes. The key elements of the project are 1) creating 3D reconstructions of study organisms used for examining eukaryote-prokaryote symbioses, and 2) developing 3D habitat maps for study sites used to examine the role of anthropogenic and environmental change on the community structure and physiological responses of several organisms. The data visualization tools will allow for annotating the 3D models with multiple forms of biological and ecological data to statistically examine relationships among the experimental variables in a 3D spatial context. This innovative approach can test the hypothesis that eukaryote-prokaryote symbioses exhibit reciprocal effects on gene expression and metabolite abundance of the study organisms. The proposed research will also quantify 3D habitat structure to test the hypothesis that anthropogenic disturbance and habitat fragmentation affects the genetic structure, survival, reproductive success, and acoustic signaling of organisms. The outcomes of the proposed CREST-PRF will provide the basis to develop new web applications to display data and findings from all CREST sub-projects, thus amplifying the impact of the CREST investment at the University of Hawaii-Hilo.