NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: Identifying high-risk bioregions and predicting the impact of climate change on the distribution of genetic diversity

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Forecasting how biodiversity will change in the future due to natural and human impacts is a primary focus of both ecology and evolutionary biology. One factor important to the geographic distribution of diversity at multiple levels - genes, species, and morphology - is climate. This proposal will study how populations have responded to past climate change, and how these responses could influence future climate change responses. This research will generate maps of future genetic diversity to identify potential areas where climate change could have a significant impact on species diversity. Understanding the spatial distributions of intraspecific genetic diversity and the role of climate refugia in evolutionary and ecological processes is important because it likely determines their potential for persistence in the face of future climate change. Determining how the distribution of intraspecific diversity of North American taxa was directly influenced by climate and landscape changes may illuminate broad-scale patterns of species’ responses to other climatic events, or more generally, to barriers impeding or constraining gene flow. This research will study how populations have responded to past climate change and how the historical distributions and past areas of climate refugia for four small mammals will influence future climate change responses. This study will utilize an interdisciplinary approach – three different data types and/or tools (next generation sequencing; GIS; bioinformatics) – to understand how historical events have shaped the current distribution of genetic diversity within a widespread species in North America and the impacts on future genetic diversity. To broaden participation, the Fellow will recruit five High School students from underrepresented groups to help facilitate the research. The Fellow will mentor them through their high school education and the college application process.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.