CSBR:Continued Support of the Duke Lemur Center for the Study of Primate Biology and History

该奖项将为杜克狐猴中心(DLC)提供支持，该中心是世界上最濒危和生物多样性最大的灵长类动物-马达加斯加狐猴-的独特活体动物收藏。狐猴是马达加斯加生物多样性热点地区的专有物种，由于它们处于极度濒危状态，不是一种可再生资源。作为一个促进跨学科研究、学术和保护的活实验室，DLC是世界上唯一一个随时可以使用狐猴及其相关生物样本、数十年的医疗记录、生活史数据和活体类群的化石近亲进行比较研究的地方。该群体的多样性使人们能够进行和交流广泛的科学领域，涵盖了行为生态学、认知、感觉交流、生物力学、解剖学、生活史战略、元基因组学、系统基因组学、种群遗传学、代谢组学等学科。此外，DLC是不同学术水平的学生的特殊培训场所。在其54年的历史中，从K-12到研究生水平的数千名学生参与了DLC的工作，并受到他们的经验的启发。兽医部通过勤工俭学机会和兽医学生培训来支持教育活动，包括为马达加斯加兽医提供实习机会。最重要的是，DLC致力于通过迁地圈养管理和广泛的基于社区的马达加斯加计划来开展保护活动。数十万来自公众的参观者通过接触DLC的工作人员、学生和收藏品，接触到了生物多样性发现和保护的概念，以及生物研究的力量。该奖项的总体目标是通过八个短期目标从战略上提高DLC活体收藏的价值，这些目标将提供重大机会，以产生更多研究和建立多学科合作，增加来自活体种群、生物组织和自然历史收藏的数据的数字化可获得性，并增加教育推广和兽医培训活动。前五个目标直接促进和加强正在进行的和计划中的研究，以确定物种(特别是基因组和古生物学数据)，了解生物系统(特别是生物力学、内分泌学、生理学、微生物生态学、行为和新陈代谢--包括麻木)，以及更广泛地说，了解进化模式和跨越生物尺度的基因类型和表型之间的联系。剩下的目标将促进外联和教育活动，以便将研究的意义传达给广大受众。群体支持是实现推进生物研究、教育和保护关键项目的这些目标的核心。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award will provide support to the Duke Lemur Center (DLC), a unique living stock collection of the world's most endangered and biologically diverse primates - the lemurs of Madagascar. Lemurs are exclusive to the biodiversity hotspot of Madagascar, and due to their critically-endangered status, are not a renewable resource. Serving as a living laboratory for advancing interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and conservation, the DLC is the only place in the world where lemurs are readily available for comparative study together with associated biological samples, decades of medical records, life history data, and fossil relatives of living taxa. The diversity of the colony enables an expansive scope of science to be conducted and communicated, covering disciplines ranging from behavioral ecology, cognition, sensory communication, biomechanics, anatomy, life-history strategy, metagenomics, phylogenomics, population genetics, metabolomics, and more. In addition, the DLC is an exceptional training ground for students across academic levels. Over its 54-year history, thousands of students ranging from K-12 through postgraduate levels have been engaged in and inspired by their experiences at the DLC. The veterinary department supports educational activities via work-study opportunities and veterinary student training, including an internship for Malagasy veterinarians. Critically, the DLC is committed to conservation activities via both ex situ captive management and extensive community-based Madagascar programs. Hundreds of thousands of visitors from the general public have been exposed to the concepts of biodiversity discovery and conservation, as well as the power of biological research via their exposure to the DLC's staff, students, and collections. The overarching aim of this award is to strategically enhance the value of the DLC’s living collection through eight short-term goals that will provide significant opportunities to generate additional research and build multi-disciplinary collaborations, increase the digital availability of data from living stocks, biological tissues, and natural history collections, and increase education outreach and veterinary training activities. The first five goals directly facilitate and enhance ongoing and planned research to identify species (in particular genomic and paleontological data), understand organismal systems (in particular biomechanics, endocrinology, physiology, microbial ecology, behavior, and metabolics – including torpor), and more broadly, to understand evolutionary patterns and the links across biological scales between genotypes and phenotypes. The remaining goals facilitate outreach and education activities so that the significance of the research will be communicated to a broad audience. Colony support is central to meeting these goals for advancing key programs in biological research, education, and conservation.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.