URoL:EN: Integrating paleogenomics, ecology, and geology to predict organism-environment coupled evolution during rapid warming and ice sheet retreat

在过去的一个世纪里，全球气候经历了显著的气温上升，造成了环境、生物和社会影响。关于生物体对气候变化的反应的研究通常集中在单个或密切相关的物种上，而且从短到最近的时间尺度。气候变化的幅度和持续时间的长期影响在很大程度上尚不清楚，因为物种之间相互作用及其所处环境的复杂网络，以及物种之间在空间和时间上的反应有很大差异。虽然地球的全球温度在其整个历史上反复波动，但上一次冰河时代刚刚结束后发生的突然变化与今天发生的过程特别有用。这项研究将集中在阿拉斯加东南部的史前气候扰动上，这是一个理想的自然实验室，保存着过去生物和气候变化的特殊地质档案。该地区是生物多样性的热点地区，在过去的4万年里，当地物种发生了显着的变化，并成为早期人类迁徙到新大陆的重要门户。聚集的学者团队拥有跨越生物和地质科学的跨学科专业知识，将研究阿拉斯加东南部生态系统如何应对冰河时代的环境变化。这项研究将为气候快速变化如何触发对本地和殖民物种的戏剧性和不可逆转的下游影响提供重要的见解。该项目将投资于跨学科STEM培训和职业发展，以培养下一代多学科科学家，包括培训博士后和一批跨越不同学科的研究生和本科生。它还将提供跨学科研讨会、一学分课程、为布法罗市高中的科学教师提供暑期继续教育计划，以及针对阿拉斯加东南部K-12学生的外展计划。全球变暖正在以地球历史上前所未有的速度发生，预计其影响包括海冰消失、海平面加速上升、天气模式变化、植物、动物和病原体地理范围的变化、生长季和花期的延长以及物种灭绝的风险。该项目将把古生态和古气候信息与遗传数据相结合，以揭示整个地区的生态系统变化，该地区是在相当高的温度、冰盖和海平面变化的背景下进化出来的。该项目采用一种融合了古基因组学、生态学、地质学和古气候学专业知识的研究方法，将重点放在最后一次冰川盛期到全新世的过渡和阿拉斯加东南部的三次全新世快速变暖事件上，这将作为一个新的和一般范式的模型系统。随着进化时间的推移，这项研究援引了“另类稳定状态”的生态学概念，将检验这一假说，即为应对过去的气候变化，生态系统经历了以另类稳定状态、环境临界点和群落快速更替时期为特征的制度转变。这项研究将填补跨越一段剧烈气候变化时期的高分辨率陆地气候记录中的重要时空空白，并确定作为应对快速环境变化的生态系统变化的普遍原则和紧急性质，包括更好地理解环境变化如何影响生态系统的复原力。该项目将投资于跨学科STEM培训和职业发展，以培养下一代多学科科学家，包括培训博士后和一批跨越不同学科的研究生和本科生。它还将提供跨学科研讨会、1学分课程、布法罗市高中科学教师的暑期继续教育计划，以及针对阿拉斯加东南部K-12学生的外展计划。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Over the last century, global climate has experienced marked temperature increases that have incurred environmental, biotic, and societal impacts. Research on organismal responses to climate change have often concentrated on single or closely-interrelated species, and over short to very recent timescales. The long-term effects from the amplitude and duration of climate-change remain largely unknown because species are embedded in complex networks of interactions with one another and the environments they live in, and because there is substantial variation in responses among species over space and time. While the Earth’s global temperatures have fluctuated repeatedly over its entire history, the abrupt changes that took place just after the last Ice Age are particularly useful analogs for processes occurring today. This research will focus on prehistoric climate perturbations in Southeast Alaska, an ideal natural laboratory that holds exceptional geologic archives of past biological and climate change. The region is a hotspot of biological diversity that hosted remarkable shifts of native species over the past ~40 thousand years and served as a crucial gateway for early human migration into the New World. The assembled team of scholars, with cross-disciplinary expertise across the biological and geological sciences, will examine how Southeast Alaskan ecosystems responded to Ice-Age environmental change. This research will provide important insights into how rapid climatic shifts can serve as triggers for dramatic and irreversible downstream impacts on both native and colonizing species. The project will invest in interdisciplinary STEM training and career-building to educate the next generation of multidisciplinary scientists, including training of postdocs and a cohort of graduate and undergraduate students spanning different disciplines. It will also offer interdisciplinary seminars, a 1-credit course, summer continuing education programs for science teachers in Buffalo City high schools, and an outreach program targeting K-12 students in Southeast Alaska.Global warming is occurring at an unprecedented rapid pace in the history of Earth, and its effects are predicted to include loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise, changes in weather patterns, shifts in geographic ranges for plants, animals and pathogens, lengthening of growing seasons and flowering times, and extinction risks. This project will integrate paleoecological and paleoclimatic information with genetic data to uncover ecosystem changes across a region that evolved through a backdrop of considerable temperature, ice sheet, and sea level transitions. Employing a convergent research approach that combines expertise in paleogenomics, ecology, geology and paleoclimatology, the project will focus on the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition and three Holocene rapid warming events in Southeast Alaska, which will serve as a model system for a new and general paradigm. Invoking the ecological concept of “alternative stable states” over evolutionary time, the research will test the hypothesis that in response to past climate change, ecosystems underwent regime shifts characterized by alternative stable states, environmental tipping points, and periods of rapid community turnover. This research will fill important spatial and temporal gaps in high-resolution, terrestrial climate records spanning a period of dramatic climate change and define universal principles and emergent properties that underlie ecosystem shifts in response to rapid environmental transformation, including a better understanding of how environmental variation impacts ecosystem resilience. The project will invest in interdisciplinary STEM training and career-building to educate the next generation of multidisciplinary scientists, including training of postdocs and a cohort of graduate and undergraduate students spanning different disciplines. It will also offer interdisciplinary seminars, a 1-credit course, summer continuing education programs for science teachers in Buffalo City high schools, and an outreach program targeting K-12 students in Southeast Alaska.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.