Collaborative LTREB Research: How will local adaptation and environmental extremes shape continental-scale changes in species distribution and abundance?

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Predicting how species will respond to environmental changes across the globe is among the greatest biological challenges faced today, as these responses will determine the continued functioning of natural ecosystems and the ability of the Earth to continue to provide food, clean water, and other resources for humankind. Most efforts to predict ecological responses to environmental changes only try to predict the future geographical ranges of species, not the actual number of individuals across the range, even though numbers are likely to be a far more important measure of ecological functioning. Among the problems with forecasting either range shifts or changes in numbers is the variability in the environment from year to year, such that short-term responses of species may be very different than long-term trends, necessitating the long-term studies to be carried out in this project. In addition, populations of widespread species often show adaptation to the local environment, so that the range of climatic conditions tolerated by a species as a whole may not reflect the suitable conditions for individuals in any one population. Ignoring local adaptation may lead to inaccurate predictions of both geographical ranges and numbers of individuals. Finally, the scientists leading this project will develop training materials and teach workshops to high school teachers in order to improve students' understanding of the ecological responses to changes in climate and other environmental conditions.This project is designed to address these and other problems in predicting ecological responses to future environmental conditions, using a long-term data set combined with new experiments. The study focuses on two wide-spread plants that occur in western North America from northernmost Alaska to central New Mexico. Seventeen years of data on the species at sites across this latitudinal range have shown how environmental change can influence survival, growth and reproduction of these plants. In the current project, plants will be transplanted between multiple sites to test for local adaptation to environmental change in the field (evidence from growth chamber experiments suggests the potential for such adaptation). Using these data and those from past and ongoing surveys of natural populations, new models will be developed to predict plant numbers in response to local environmental conditions for populations across the continent. These predictions will then be tested against current distributions and population sizes. After this validation, the local models will be tied to global models to improve predictions of ecological responses to future environmental conditions. The goals of the project are both to better predict how these particular species will respond to changes in their environment and to develop and test methods for making such predictions that can be used for many other species.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.