Collaborative Research: ORCC: LIVING WITH EXTREMES - PREDICTING ECOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN A HIGH-ALTITUDE ALPINE SONGBIRD

野生动物应对气候变化的能力取决于做以下三件事中的一件或多件的能力：迁移到合适的地区，通过进化适应，或者调整行为和生理。气候变化可能会迫使山顶的野生动物随着气温的上升而登上“自动扶梯灭绝”，因为不存在海拔更高的选择。这个项目研究了两种相关的山顶鸣鸟--棕冠朱雀和内华达山脉灰冠朱雀--如何结合这些策略，随着时间的推移在极端高山环境中保持专门化和持久化。它使用博物馆标本来建立气候变化前的基线，并进行实地调查，以探索目前的应对策略在每只鸣禽的高海拔范围内是如何变化的。该项目将这些发现与气候变化预测相结合，通过一个综合的统计模型预测未来的反应，该模型结合了运动、进化和行为变化，如每年育儿时间和饮食的变化。目前，缺乏有关玫瑰雀(RF)的基本信息阻碍了州和联邦机构的管理。该项目将向美国西部的伙伴机构提供量身定制的报告和数据产品，以便能够将调查结果和模式方法纳入决策。该项目还将通过加州大学伯克利分校多丽丝·杜克保护学者计划和中心，每年为四名本科生提供暑期实地研究实习机会，以推进以指导、探究为基础的机会(CAMINO)，服务于STEM边缘背景的学生，并将一名研究生和两名博士后研究员培养为科学家和不同学生的有效导师。尽管关于高海拔物种灭绝和范围收缩的报道越来越多，但人们对基因流和局部适应在避免物种灭绝中的潜在作用以及可能允许个体应对和影响其生态进化反应的行为反应的关注较少。相应地，尽管通过物种分布模拟确定范围转移能力的方法在过去几十年中得到了稳步发展，但将适应能力、可塑性和分布转移纳入预测物种对环境变化反应的统一框架的能力仍然有限。统计、基因组和生态学方法在两个玫瑰雀亚种之间的整合将解决基本的生态进化问题：自然选择如何跨越空间和时间来限制物种分布？在极端环境专家中，生态和进化约束对气候变化反应的作用是什么？该项目将空间数据与博物馆标本的历史数据相结合，以建立一个关于遗传、表型和生态对气候变化的反应及其反馈的机械性、层次化模型。这项工作还将有助于识别生物标记物，以了解高山鸟类专家对气候的耐受性。最后，该项目将向Rosy-Finch以及气候变化下的更广泛的野生动物管理提供信息，通过改进工具来预测物种分布和丰富度，并在考虑管理需求时包括空间和时间上的生物变化。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。

The ability of wildlife to cope with climate change depends on the capacity to do one or more of three things: move to suitable areas, adapt through evolution, or adjust behavior and physiology. Climate change can force mountaintop wildlife onto an “escalator to extinction” as temperatures rise, because no higher-elevation options exist. This project examines how two related mountaintop songbirds, the Brown-capped Rosy-Finch and the Sierra Nevada Gray-Crowned Rosy-Finch, have combined these strategies to specialize and persist in extreme alpine environments over time. It uses museum specimens to establish a pre-climate change baseline and field surveys to explore how current coping strategies vary across the high-elevation range of each songbird. The project integrates these findings with climate change projections to forecast future responses through an integrated statistical model incorporating movement, evolutionary, and behavior changes such as shifts in annual timing of parenting and diet. Absence of basic information about Rosy-Finches (RF) currently hinders management by state and federal agencies. The project will deliver tailored reports and data products to partner agencies in the western United States to enable uptake of findings and model approaches into decision-making. The project will also provide summer field research internships to four undergraduate students each year through the UCSC Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program and Center to Advance Mentored, Inquiry-based Opportunities (CAMINO), which serve students from marginalized backgrounds in STEM, and train a graduate student and two postdoctoral fellows as scientists and effective mentors for diverse students. While reports of extirpations and range contractions in high-altitude species are increasingly widespread, less attention has been paid to the potential roles of gene flow and local adaptation in extinction avoidance, and of behavioral responses that could both allow individuals to cope and influence their eco-evolutionary responsiveness. Correspondingly, while the methodology for determining the capacity for range shifts through species distribution modeling has developed steadily over the last several decades, the ability to incorporate the capacity for adaptation, plasticity, and distributional shifts into a unified framework for forecasting species responses to environmental change remains limited. The integration of statistical, genomic, and ecological approaches across two Rosy-Finch subspecies will address fundamental eco-evolutionary questions: How does natural selection operate across space and time to constrain species distributions? What are the roles of ecological and evolutionary constraints on climate change response in extreme-environment specialists? The project will integrate spatial data with historical data from museum specimens to build a mechanistic, hierarchical model of genetic, phenotypic, and ecological responses to climate change and feedbacks among them. The work will also help identify biomarkers for understanding climate tolerance across high-alpine bird specialists. Finally, the project will inform Rosy-Finch as well as broader wildlife management under climate change by refining tools to forecast species distributions and abundances and including spatial and temporal organismal variation in considering management needs.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.