Workshop: Halo-DaSH: The Deep and Shallow History of Aquatic Life’s Passages between Marine and Freshwater Habitats

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award supports a symposium and workshop, the goal of which is to highlight how biological exchanges between salty and freshwater habitats have transformed the biosphere. Life in the ocean and in freshwater habitats have long been intertwined. Major branches of the tree of life originated in the oceans and colonized fresh waters, often adapting to the new regime and diversifying. Similar exchanges continue to this day, including some species that continually migrate between salty and fresh waters. Scientists who study these processes typically focus on a single group of living organisms, or on the fossil record that documents ancient colonizations. The purpose of the activities supported by this grant is to stimulate new research on the history of life and present-day stresses to aquatic systems. Planned activities will consist of a day-long symposium during the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and a one-day workshop designed to facilitate innovative thinking and the involvement of scientists who are diverse in disciplinary orientation, country of origin, and stage of professional development. These interactions will yield products including manuscripts that synthesize research findings across disciplines and grant proposals for new research on gaps in knowledge that have been highlighted by the workshop collaborations. Because global conditions such as sea level that shaped ancient exchanges are currently changing at a rapid rate due to intensifying human impacts, the results of the symposium and workshop should help scientists understand emerging threats to biodiversity related to changes in aquatic habitat solute concentration and global climate change.The symposium and workshop will address several questions about how biotic exchange between salty and fresh habitats has transformed the biosphere: When did major colonizations of fresh waters happen? What circumstances facilitated the transition? How frequent have been returns to marine habitats? How porous is the boundary: is change in halohabitat routine, requiring few modifications, or does it rarely occur because it requires special conditions and substantial genomic alterations? What adaptive changes occurred to accommodate the physiochemical and ecological differences? How do marine and freshwater lineages differ in organism-level features, ecological relationships, evolutionary processes? To what extent has diversification been propelled by the transitions? What differences in ecosystem services arise from these transformations? In what ways are the freshwater and marine forms subject to different anthropogenic stressors? The symposium, workshop, and resulting products will integrate findings at multiple levels of biological organization and from disparate fields, and use this science to better understand responses to global change in each realm. The transdisciplinary approach will allow participants to establish new collaborations and address questions that cross disciplinary boundaries, thereby stimulating new research to fill identified gaps in knowledge. Diverse scientists from a broad range of disciplines, including graduate students and individuals from groups under-represented in science, will participate, and results will be disseminated in journal articles, white papers, and via a project website, Twitter account and Instagram feed. The resulting collaborations will enhance interactions across biological and geoscience disciplines and will impact interdisciplinary curricula for undergraduate and graduate students.This award is co-funded by the Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics Program in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems, Directorate for Biological Sciences, and the Sedimentary Geology and Paleobiology Program in the Division of Earth Sciences, Directorate for Geosciences.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.