CAREER: Understanding Evolutionary Responses to Climate Change Across Space and Time

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Ongoing climate change presents significant threat to global biodiversity. One way to predict the consequences of future climate change is to examine how vulnerable species have been affected by historical climatic patterns. Collections of preserved specimens in natural history museums provide such a window into the past. New methods for extracting and sequencing DNA from these specimens open up exciting opportunities to reveal evolutionary changes in the western fence lizard over the last century. This research examine specimens from two studies about 50 and 100 years ago. The lizards were collected at specific sites along a latitudinal gradient in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. They will be compared with population samples from their modern day descendants. The DNA sequences will be paired with detailed 3D morphological scans of each specimen for analysis. The research will evaluate how population demographics in this species have changed through time. The analysis will reveal how populations have moved in response to a changing climate. It will assess which genes and traits are involved in local adaptation. A new research and learning experience will be developed using the data and workflow from this study to teach undergraduates critical skills in big data and scientific computing. This will be conducted through a program at UC Berkeley designed to address underrepresentation in all areas of data science. Additionally, the data collected in this project will be used to develop an augmented reality educational game. The game will challenge high school student groups to collect and analyze data on the effects of climate change while exploring a real outdoor space. Understanding how species will respond and adapt to non-stationary environmental change is a major challenge in modern biology. Research on population-level responses is critical for understanding how genetic diversity, population connectivity, and adaptive potential can be maintained in the face of ongoing climate change. This project will conduct analyses at multiple scales to examine high resolution genomic and morphometric datasets that capture responses to climate change in natural populations across space and time. These datasets will be built from contemporary collections of western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis) paired with specimens collected from the same study area 50 years and 100 years ago and will be analyzed alongside environmental GIS data corresponding to each time period. These longitudinal analyses of microevolutionary responses to climate change will address questions about the population-level effects of environmental change. Which genes and traits are involved in adaptation to climate change? How do changing environments affect population dynamics and genetic diversity? The results of this study will make available genomic and morphological data on one of the pioneering studies of local adaptation from a century ago, to the benefit of future students and researchers.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.