BII-Design: Developing a Tree-Focused Biological Integration Institute

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This award will enable the Morton Arboretum to design a Biology Integration Institute that will take a multidisciplinary approach to understanding and predicting whole tree responses to rapid environmental changes, including emerging climates, biotic invasions, and urbanization, across organizational (i.e., from molecules to ecosystems) and temporal scales (i.e., from moments to generations). Trees shape terrestrial environments, both in natural and built environments, creating forests and woodlands and play a major role in global water, carbon, nutrient, and energy cycles. With their extensive root systems and expansive leaf canopies, they integrate above and below ground conditions, linking the soil and sky through a dynamic biotic system. Tree responses to these emerging novel environments - be it an urban parkway or an increasingly dry woodland - also alter the environment they live in and generate biological innovations in traits, genes, behavior, community composition, and clades. A synthetic approach is necessary to understand these complex and contingent systems and tease apart questions of nature versus nurture and how we might best manage trees in the future. During the Design phase, the project will enhance the current undergraduate research and public outreach activities of the institution, especially with regard to individuals who are underrepresented in the sciences. Trees, as a growth form, are a great model system for integrative biology and the study of biotic response to environmental change. Not only do they dominate terrestrial ecosystems and form the fundamental ecological and evolutionary basis for many ecosystems, they possess numerous compelling biological characteristics making them particularly good integrators of environmental change. The researchers will design a Biological Integration Institute focused on the theme of “how trees respond to and shape novel environments.” They will leverage the unique research and training resources of a large public botanic garden encompassing urban, managed, restored, and remnant ecosystems. In the Design phase, the researchers in the Center for Tree Science will work with internal and external experts to: 1) Clarify a core overarching question, identify opportunities for synergy in existing projects, and prioritize new cross-disciplinary collaborative research teams and projects; 2) Create a management plan and strategies for data integration and collaboration that allow for interdisciplinary cross-talk, including designing an integrative database that builds on lessons from prior NSF investments; and 3) how to leverage the Arboretum’s existing integrated training and mentorship program in tree science, which prepares students and early career scientists for interdisciplinary, collaborative careers across a range of fields and agencies.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.