NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020: Functional traits as indicators of community structure and function

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will use biological collections in innovative ways. Large mammal communities are being affected by climate change and habitat loss at a startling rate. This research will investigate how physical traits, such as teeth and skeletal elements, within mammalian communities are related to the specific environments where they are found. Using traits preserved in the fossil record, the fellow will explore how communities of mammals are naturally assembled and how those communities respond to environmental changes and human activities over long time scales. This research will contribute to conservation of biodiversity by providing a more complete understanding of ecosystems and how they change through time and across environments. While conducting this research, the fellow will be trained in novel methods of three-dimensional data collection from museum specimens, evidence-based techniques for teaching quantitative data analysis, and innovative strategies for communicating science to a public audience. The fellow will develop informational manuals local animals and how these change through time based on research results and will collaborate with 40 US biological field stations to use the manuals into their outreach programming.Research objectives will use functional trait-environment relationships to connect trait patterns with mammalian community assembly and describe the related effects of ecological and evolutionary processes. First, the fellow will characterize trait-environment patterns in the fossil record by evaluating response lags in traits and functional groups in relation to the environment. Geographic, temporal, environmental, and faunal components of each lag will be used to identify patterns of primary and significant underpinning processes, such as speciation, extinction, and range shift. Second, the fellow will investigate how modern trait-environment patterns are affected by anthropogenic pressures, such as land use and non-native species including domestic and invasive species. Inclusion of land use patterns and replacement by or addition of new, non-native community members will be used to improve predictive trait-environment models of biodiversity change. With training from mentors, the fellow will integrate two research objectives and three training objectives to produce informal, place-based learning materials that incorporate the paleobiological results from this research. The fellow will gain mentoring experience by supervising two undergraduates who will participate in this project as student 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.