Collaborative Research: ORCC: Understanding Organismal Behavioral Responses to Climate Change to Forecast Eco-evolutionary Dynamics of Albatrosses Populations

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The accelerating pace of global change creates urgency to understand and predict climate impacts on populations to enable decision-making for conservation and resource management. Such a capacity requires a clear understanding of how organisms respond to climate change and whether this response can scale up to the population level and have demographic consequences. This project focuses on two sentinel species, the wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans), and the black-browed albatross (Thalassarche melanophris), living in the Southern Ocean and asks whether adaptation in individual behavior, which is the most proximal response of organisms to climate change, can mitigate population declines. Through a comprehensive examination of the links between climate, individual capacity to acquire resources (i.e., foraging behaviors), and population dynamics, this project will improve our understanding of the pathways through which population resilience may be expected. Also, based on state-of-the-art modeling techniques that will account for adaptive evolution, this project will result in forecasts of population trend and predictions of population persistence in the future. Predictions will then be brought directly to the international bodies involved in conserving these species, seeking to inform ongoing conservation efforts, including the development of Marine Protected Areas. This award will also allow training of the next generation of scientists to work directly with policymakers as engaged scholars. Adaptive changes in foraging effort have a potential to mitigate population declines under climate change. Surprisingly, a large gap remains in our understanding of the links between foraging effort and individual fitness, as well as population dynamics. This project aims to understand and forecast how plasticity and evolutionary adaptation in foraging effort can limit population declines of climate-threatened seabird species through an eco-evo-demographic approach. This project relies on individual-level empirical data on body condition, foraging behaviors, demographic rates, and pedigree collected on two albatross species living in the Southern Ocean: the wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) and the black-browed albatross (Thalassarche melanophris). This project will first assess the mechanistic linkages between climate change, body condition, foraging effort, individual fitness, and population dynamics. Then, using state-of-the-art eco-evolutionary matrix population models coupled with climatic scenarios, the project will result in forecasts of eco-evolutionary dynamics and future population trends under climate change and adaptive evolution. This award will bring together the fields of climate forecasting and organismal and population ecology to transform our understanding of the relative importance of natural climate variability and predictability for eco-evolutionary dynamics.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.