Collaborative Research: RoL: Detecting and predicting the relative contributions of fecundity and survival to fitness in changing environments

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The research will address an urgent societal need, which is to accurately predict biological responses to environmental change. This project aims to improve prediction techniques by investigating how animals respond to shifts in both average environmental conditions and short-term, extreme environmental conditions. Average environmental conditions over time determine rates of energy gain and subsequently reproductive rates, whereas survival can be strongly influenced by short-term, extreme environmental conditions. In many species, the relative importance of reproduction and survival in determining fitness change systematically along environmental gradients. Along a mountain slope, reproduction is constrained at high altitudes by a short, cool, growing season, while survival is challenged at low altitudes in summer due to hot temperature extremes. The project goal is to develop a general modeling approach that can bridge levels of biological organization, space and time to predict shifts in survival and reproduction constraints and thus improve our ability to forecast responses to environmental gradients and change. The project will greatly expand two education and outreach projects. The TrEnCh project (trenchproject.github.io) will develop and share additional computational and visualization tools to Translate Environmental Change into biological impacts. The Beetle Project, offering hands-on modules to study climate change responses, will focus on expanding educational access across levels of English literacy and socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the project will provide integrative training in evolutionary ecology, genomics, physiology, and quantitative skills to a diverse group of high school, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. The project will leverage survey and specimen data, from recent and historical periods, in an assemblage of grasshopper species found along a montane elevation gradient that vary in traits such as dispersal, phenology, morphology, and thermal specialization. Field reciprocal transplant experiments will quantify the integrated response to the environment, while assessing whether local adaptation and plasticity moderate reproduction and survival constraints along the environmental gradient. The transplants will use physiological and genomic biomarkers to test the hypothesis that survival constraints predominate at low elevations, while reproduction constraints predominate at high elevations. Lab common garden experiments manipulating environmental attributes that vary with elevation (temperature, temperature variability, photoperiod, radiation, hypoxia) will test physiological mechanisms that underlie fitness constraints. Model building will integrate these physiological mechanisms to predict responses to the elevation gradient. Then, historic survey and specimen data will be used to test whether these models successfully hindcast patterns of genetic, physiological, phenotypic, and demographic responses to 50 years of environmental change.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.