Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: WILD HEALTH: How does environmental health affect wildlife health?

贝尔蒙特论坛合作研究：野生动物健康：环境健康如何影响野生动物健康？

• 批准号: 1854725
• 负责人: Donald Spalinger
• 金额: $ 18万
• 依托单位: University of Alaska Anchorage Campus
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-05-15 至 2024-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1854725&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Belmont; Forum; Collaborative; Research; WILD

Innovative research on the complex interaction of socio-economic and global environmental trends on biodiversity and ecosystem services is needed to help develop more informative scenarios for addressing environmental and human development challenges. To overcome these challenges coupled natural-human systems approaches and analyses are needed. These provide improved scenarios of biodiversity and ecosystem services that couple the outputs of direct and indirect drivers such as land use, invasive species, overexploitation, biodiversity, environmental change, and pollution. The resulting models provide a methodological state-of-the art that results in more accurate quantitative assessments, better land use, and more effective ecosystem services. Employing this methodology, the funded project, which is an international coalition between US scientists and those from two Scandinavian nations, seeks to examine whether microbes on the skin and in the gut of wildlife have positive health benefits (i.e., fewer allergies, increased disease resistance, etc.) that are comparable to those discovered in humans with high endemic microbial diversity. The work also seeks to determine how and/or if wildlife and their endemic microbiomes change under differently managed environments. Boreal forest wildlife (moose and voles) were selected for study because ~80% of global terrestrial biodiversity is found in boreal forests and because these two species allow comparison between species inhabiting different habitats and interacting with different parts of the ecosystem. Samples will be taken from both species and examined for diverse measures of "health", such as internal and external microbial community diversity, parasite/pathogen infection, body condition, etc. Work will focus on quantifying the role microbes play (e.g., supplying energy, inducing or reducing inflammation, increasing or decreasing parasite/pathogen burden) in wildlife health and species response to environmental changes/conditions. It will also address how the microbiome of wildlife is impacted as a result of changes in biodiversity that is driven by changes in land use, different forest management practices, habitat, diet, etc.). Broader impacts of the work include international collaboration between the US, Finland, and Sweden. Results will help provide better understanding of challenges in biodiversity conservation and the role of global change and forestry management practices on wildlife. The work is also likely to provide new avenues for improved ecological monitoring. In addition, this work provides important information from which to determine whether forest biodiversity impacts human health, via a potential increase in parasite burden due to decreased microbiome diversity in forest wildlife that may increase zoonotic disease risks for humans. Additional impacts include the integration of research and education and the training of students to be part of the new generation of international scholars. The project also funds an institution in an EPSCoR state (i.e., Alaska).This award supports US researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a coalition of 26 funding agencies from 23 countries through the Belmont Forum call for proposals on "Scenarios of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services". The call was a multilateral initiative designed to support research projects that contribute to the development of scenarios, models, and decision-support tools for understanding and solving critical issues facing our planet. The goal of the competition was to improve and apply participatory scenario methods to enhance research relevance and its acceptance and to address gaps in methods for modelling impact drivers and policy interventions. It was also to develop and communicate levels of uncertainty associated with the models, to improve data accessibility and fill gaps in knowledge. Using this methodology, the funded project will test the hypothesis: Environmental biodiversity has a positive effect on wildlife health. To test this, state-of-the-art genomics methods, molecular biology, and bioinformatics will be combined with data and measurements from forest community ecology, empirical data, and field experiments. Funds for US participants in the larger international consortium support the part of the larger study that focuses on Alaskan boreal forest moose that are exposed to both direct and indirect human impacts. Indirect impacts would include the increase in human fossil fuel consumption which is contributing to global warming. This warming contributes to increased fire intensity and frequency in Arctic and boreal ecosystems. Direct impacts are when humans use fire as a tool to manage forest habitats to improve wildlife diversity and/or productivity. Although in Alaska, burning generally increases the availability and diversity of woody deciduous browses for moose, it also results in juvenile stages of plant growth, reduces ground shading, and increases water stress in plants. This changes plant resource allocation patterns by increasing production of polyphenolics and other structural components. Thus, while fire may produce more browse and support higher densities of moose, their food may be of substantially lower nutritional quality, something that can reduce individual animal productivity and survivorship. The US component of this project addresses the impact of plant chemistry on the microbial composition and function of moose rumen to examine impacts on moose health and population productivity. Microbiome samples of skin, nasal, and moose lower gastrointestinal tracts will be taken and analyzed to see if such impacts extend to other important microbiomes of the animals and to what extent these contribute to overall wildlife health. The hypothesis that browse diversity and nutritional quality influence moose diets will be tested by quantifying what moose eat, using fecal samples collected from the rectum of anesthetized wild moose and fresh fecal samples collected during field work associated with characterizing the diversity and abundance of foods available to moose in the study sites. Rumen contents of immobilized moose (ten individuals) in unburned and adjacent burned areas of two different moose ranges in interior and southcentral Alaska will also be analyzed. Diets will be characterized using cuticular alkane/long-chain alcohol signatures of feces and foods as well as plant DNA metabarcoding methodologies. Habitat food diversity and nutritional characteristics (digestibility, tannins, etc.) will be determined at each of the study sites through plotless surveys of plant diversity and abundance and via standard nutritional analytical procedures. This research will also test the hypothesis that moose diets influence the diversity and function of rumen microbial communities. Rumen and fecal microbiota will be taken and analyzed from each of the moose captured and sampled using high throughput DNA sequencing of 16s rDNA to test this hypothesis. In addition, the hypothesis that microbial community diversity of moose is negatively related to their parasite/pathogen loads will be tested by examining external and intestinal parasite loads of sampled individuals using standard protocols for parasites. These results will be compared using microbial diversity measures.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.