CAREER: From Genes to Assemblages: Causes and Consequences of Spatiotemporal Population Variation Across Millennia in Small Mammals

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Understanding how species respond to environmental change, and the long-term consequences of those responses, is important for appropriately managing biodiversity for the future. Using fossilized small mammal populations from the recent past (spanning the environmental changes of the last 21,000 years) in the western United States, this project will explore the ability of different species and communities to adapt to future environmental changes and their likelihood of extinction. The research findings will be translated into evidence-based educational activities for middle school through college students and the broader public, aiming to increase scientific literacy of the public. Species niches and community context interact to shape species responses to environmental change, and the ecological and evolutionary legacies of these responses will persist for many years into the future. To investigate the drivers and outcomes of population-level responses to long-term change, small mammal fossil deposits in the western US spanning the past 1000s of years will be excavated, and compared to previously excavated deposits from northern California. The relative influence of climate, environmental niches, and biotic interactions on shaping variability in population abundances across space and time will be quantified. Then, the influence of population-level abundance changes on compositional, functional and genetic structure and diversity through time will be determined. Finally, these patterns will be forecast to the future to determine how environmental change may influence the ecological and evolutionary structure of future populations and assemblages. The research findings will be developed into teaching modules for middle and high-school classrooms and the broader public. In parallel, the PI will revise her undergraduate classes to fit a framework of active learning and evidence-based pedagogical techniques. Overall, this project will significantly advance understanding of the patterns, processes, and outcomes of species responses to climate change, as well as the scientific literacy of the public.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.