Collaborative Research: Litter Arthropods of High Appalachia

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Appalachian peaks are home to many animal species found nowhere else on Earth, including many new species of arthropods (insects, millipedes, and relatives) that await discovery and description. The highest Appalachian mountains (5000 feet) harbor spruce-fir forests that are relicts of Pleistocene times. These unique communities are threatened by invasive species and habitat loss. However, a lack of information about native species diversity hinders their conservation. This project, a collaboration between Clemson University and Virginia Tech, will fill in large biodiversity knowledge gaps for the arthropods in these unique forests, and will share this information with federal and state land managers responsible for conservation. The project team, with student trainees, will visit each of these spruce-fir 'islands' to survey the arthropods, and will then make a biological library of the species using genomic tools. These tools will allow rapid identification of the hundreds of distinct species, and comparison will reveal the uniqueness of each mountain's inhabitants, as well as their evolutionary histories. The research team, composed of graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral trainees and senior personnel, will work together on data collection and analysis, publishing, and outreach phases of the project. Public events such as lectures and workshops with state and national parks in the region and short videos will share the activities and findings of the project with the widest possible audience. The specific goals of the project are to: (1) assess diversity at 22 of the highest points in the southern Appalachian Mountains; (2) establish a high throughput sequencing approach to efficiently document leaf litter arthropods; (3) assess the magnitude and geographic scale of endemism and cryptic species diversity; and (4) increase appreciation for the diversity and uniqueness of high elevation faunas, and highlight the urgency to protect them. A voucher-based metabarcoding workflow, utilizing COI and 16S amplicons, will be used as the basis for comparison among communities. This will establish a database of barcode sequences for many novel taxa and yield a rich data set for resolving species boundaries and population relationships. Data analyses will employ phylogenetic, population genetic, and other statistical methods to address questions of evolutionary relationships, historical connectivity and environmental determinants of diversity. Anticipated results include dozens of newly discovered species, thousands of barcode sequences for species as-yet-unrepresented in public databases, and a deep understanding of biogeographic histories for a great swath of diversity across an area of high conservation value.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.