RII Track-4: Collaborative partnerships at the cusp of wildlife ecology and molecular biology

这项研究基础设施改善RII轨道4赠款将研究黄石国家公园的迁徙野生动物如何调整其饮食以应对季节变化。科学家们需要了解野生动物食用的植物如何能够促进迁徙，以便预测迁徙野生动物的多样性及其选择的路线可能会如何变化。这对大型野生动物尤其重要，如野牛和叉角羚羊，它们自然会在公共和私人土地上进行长距离迁徙。该项目将使用尖端的分子技术来法医鉴定五种野生动物在季节性迁徙过程中食用的食物植物。工作的每一步都将加强罗得岛内的大学教学，加强跨多个司法管辖区的学术-政府合作，并积极改变调查员的职业轨迹。拟议的工作建立了一个新的课程为基础的本科研究计划，提高访问和纳入布朗大学的指导研究。与国家公园管理局的科学家合作，学生将开发法医方法来描述动物饮食并公开报告结果。这些目标将确保培养一支多样化的工作队伍，他们具有开发和交流现代环境科学、医疗保健和流行病学中必不可少的快速基因测试类型所需的经验。野生动物生物学和分子生物学中出现的方法可以帮助推动生态学从个体动物行为到整个生态系统功能的跨越尺度。众所周知，动物饮食在这些尺度上都很重要，因为食物的可获得性影响着个体的运动和许多物种在资源有限的世界中共存的能力。然而，以这些不同尺度为重点的理论框架可能会对物种如何应对环境变化产生相互矛盾的预测。在这个建议中，我们专注于调和预测季节性的饮食的广泛研究的组合迁移大型食草动物从黄石国家公园，这是北美最多样化的大型食草动物社区。我们的建议结合了研究者在饮食DNA元条形码方面的专业知识，以及宿主地点的长期GPS跟踪和实地实验数据。我们将检验以下假设：（1）季节性饮食变化在个体到食物网的尺度上是可预测的;（2）季节性植物-食草动物相互作用的反馈调节这些尺度上的饮食重叠和专业化。布朗大学的研究员、博士后研究助理和学生将与国家公园管理局的科学家合作，对这些假设进行检验。在这个过程中，该团队将生成并公开一套生物资源，这些资源将具有很长的生命周期，对研究和教育有用，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查进行评估，被认为值得支持的搜索.

This Research Infrastructure Improvement RII Track-4 grant will examine how the migratory wildlife of Yellowstone National Park adjust their diets in response to seasonal change. Scientists need to understand how the plants that wild animals eat are able to fuel migrations in order to anticipate how the diversity of migratory wildlife and the routes that they select might change. This is especially important for large wildlife, such as bison and pronghorn antelope, that naturally engage in long-distance migrations across both public and private lands. This project will use cutting-edge molecular technologies to forensically identify the food plants that five species of wildlife eat during the course of their seasonal migrations. Each step of the work will enhance university teaching within Rhode Island, strengthen academic-government collaboration across multiple jurisdictions, and positively transform the career trajectory of the investigator. The proposed work establishes a new course-based undergraduate research program that enhances access and inclusion in mentored research at Brown University. In collaboration with scientists from the National Park Service, students will develop forensic methods to characterize animal diets and report results publicly. These goals will ensure the training of a diverse workforce with the experience needed to develop and communicate about the types of rapid genetic tests that are essential in modern environmental science, healthcare, and epidemiology.Approaches emerging in wildlife biology and molecular biology can help advance ecology across scales from individual animal behaviors to the functioning of entire ecosystems. Animal diets are known to be important across these scales because food availability influences both individual movements and the ability of many species to coexist in a world of limited resources. However, theoretical frameworks that have developed with a focus on each of these different scales can generate conflicting predictions about how species will respond to environmental change. In this proposal, we focus on reconciling predictions about seasonality in the diets of an extensively studied assemblage of migratory large herbivores from Yellowstone National Park, which is North America’s most diverse large-herbivore community. Our proposal combines the investigator’s expertise in dietary DNA metabarcoding with the host site’s long-term GPS-tracking and field experimental data. We will test the hypotheses that (1) seasonal dietary shifts are predictable at scales spanning individuals to food webs and (2) feedbacks in seasonal plant-herbivore interactions modulate dietary overlap and specialization across these scales. The investigator, postdoctoral research associate, and students at Brown University will collaborate with scientists from the National Park Service to test these hypotheses. In the process, the team will generate and make publicly available a suite of biological resources that will have a long lifecycle of usefulness to research and education, including digital herbarium collections and a DNA reference library that are relevant across multiple EPSCoR jurisdictions.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.