BII: INSITE: Institute for Symbiotic Interactions, Teaching, and Education in the Face of a Changing Climate

社会目前正在经历一个气候迅速变化的时代，这可能会使地球的生态系统崩溃。如果不立即采取全球行动，预计到2030年地球将变暖2摄氏度，到2100年将超过5摄氏度。这些新的全球和生态条件定义了这个时代，导致全球生物多样性急剧下降，威胁到依赖与微生物共生关系获得基本利益的生物。由于所有植物和动物都与微生物进行广泛的相互作用，因此评估宿主及其微生物如何应对这种快速变化的气候是很重要的。新的生物整合研究所INSITE——面对气候变化的共生相互作用、教学和教育研究所——汇集了加州大学默塞德分校、密歇根州立大学和弹性海洋的一个多学科团队，通过共生的视角确定气候变化的主要威胁。INSITE将开发预测生物多样性丧失的工具，并为如何避免这种破坏提供关键的见解。该项目采用综合和协作的方法来确定气候变化将如何影响物种生存和适应未来环境的能力。这项综合研究的结果将为保护和政策倡导者提供适当的工具，以制定计划，减轻未来一系列潜在气候的生物多样性损失。此外，INSITE将成为一个共生的跳板，形成一个由科学家、教育工作者、学生和社区合作伙伴组成的多元化群体，他们尊重和庆祝个体差异，从而扩大他们对我们周围世界的理解。INSITE的学者们将利用他们的科学传播技能，开展各种旨在接触当地农村社区的活动。该研究所将进一步提供一套便携式工具和外联资源，用于教育和培训K-12、本科、研究生和博士后阶段的共生和气候变化学生。最后，INSITE寻求增加STEM的公平性和多样性，通过创造一种旨在招募和留住来自不同背景（种族、社会经济、性别等）的科学人才的氛围，平等尊重每个人的投入。INSITE的总体目标是建立一个框架，以了解微生物共生系统对气候变化的适应能力，该框架可用于在不断变化的世界中垂直扩展共生研究和培训。通过合作，INSITE将整合生态学、进化学、生理学、生物信息学、应用数学和保护生物学等主题下的三个模型系统的研究，为气候危机下共生的综合研究建立一套期望和路线图的基础。这种STEM学科的综合方法将打破阻碍STEM学科有效合作的跨学科障碍。此外，INSITE将制定一套标准，以便对其他共生系统进行严格、复制和比较研究。该研究所将为生物学领域提供丰富的生态、基因组、分子、建模和模拟数据资源，这些数据收集于不同的时间尺度。拟议中的实验将建立新的方法和模型，这些方法和模型不仅有助于广泛地理解共生系统，而且还有助于作为气候变化威胁的“煤矿中的金丝雀”指标。最后，INSITE的一个基本目标是培养一代又一代的新科学家对微生物相互作用对保护生物多样性的重要性有一个整体的看法。INSITE的研究员将被授权进行跨学科和系统的综合思考。研究所的受训者将把共生领域扩大到新的生物系统和科学前沿，使研究所的研究员在各种职业中更具竞争力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Society is currently experiencing an era of rapidly changing climate that threatens to collapse Earth’s ecosystems. The planet is expected to warm by 2°C by 2030 and exceed a 5°C increase by 2100 without immediate global action. These new global and ecological conditions that define this era have led to steep declines in global biodiversity, threatening organisms that depend on symbiotic associations with microbes for essential benefits. Since all plants and animals engage in a broad spectrum of interactions with microbes, it is important to assess how hosts and their microbes will respond to this rapidly shifting climate. The new Biological Integration Institute, INSITE - The INstitute for Symbiotic Interactions, Teaching, and Education in the Face of a Changing Climate - brings together a multi-disciplinary team at the University of California at Merced, Michigan State University, and Resilient Oceans to identify key threats of climate change through a symbiotic lens. INSITE will develop tools to predict biodiversity loss and offer critical insight into how to avoid such devastation. The project employs an integrative and collaborative approach to determine how climate change will impact the ability of species to survive and adapt to future environments. Results from this integrated research will provide appropriate tools for conservation and policy advocates to construct plans to mitigate biodiversity loss across a range of potential climate futures. In addition, INSITE will serve as a symbiosis springboard, forming a diverse group of scientists, educators, students, and community partners who respect and celebrate those individual differences that can broaden their comprehension of the world around us. INSITE scholars will leverage their science communication skills with various activities designed to reach out to local-rural communities. The Institute will further deliver a set of portable tools and outreach resources that work to educate and train students in symbiosis and climate change across K-12, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc levels. Finally, INSITE seeks to increase equity and diversity in STEM, where each individual’s input is equally respected by creating an atmosphere designed to recruit and retain people from diverse backgrounds (race, socioeconomic, gender, etc.) in science.The overarching goal of INSITE is to develop a framework for understanding the resilience of microbial symbiotic systems to climate change that can be used to vertically expand symbiosis research and training in a changing world. Collaboratively, INSITE will integrate studies of three model systems under the themes of ecology, evolution, physiology, bioinformatics, applied mathematics, and conservation biology to establish a foundation of a set of expectations and a roadmap for the integrative study of symbioses under climate crises. This integrated approach of STEM disciplines will break down interdisciplinary barriers that prevent STEM disciplines from effectively working together. Additionally, INSITE will develop a set of standards that allow for rigorous, replicative, and comparative research across other symbiotic systems. The Institute will provide the field of biology with a rich resource of ecological, genomic, molecular, modeling, and simulation data collected across varying time scales. The proposed experiments will establish novel approaches and models that are useful for understanding not only symbiotic systems broadly, but also as “canary in a coalmine” indicators of climate change threats. Finally, a foundational goal of INSITE is to train generations of new scientists to have a holistic view on the importance of microbial interactions for conserving biodiversity. INSITE fellows will be empowered to think integratively across disciplines and systems. The Institute’s trainees will broaden the field of symbiosis to new biological systems and scientific frontiers, making INSITE fellows more competitive for various careers.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.