OPUS: Synthesizing three decades of tadpole plasticity experiments with two decades of wetland surveys

OPUS：综合三十年的蝌蚪可塑性实验和二十年的湿地调查

• 批准号: 2243432
• 负责人: Rick Relyea
• 金额: $ 27.88万
• 依托单位: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-05-01 至 2025-04-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2243432&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: OPUS; Synthesizing; three; decades; tadpole

Many plants and animals experience variable environmental conditions over space and time and they can respond by changing their shape in ways that make them better suited to their current environment. Decades of experiments have provided tremendous insights into how plants and animal change shape, but we know much less about “shape-shifting” species in nature. Understanding how plants and animals evolve the ability to change their traits in different environments is of interest not only to foundational research in biology, but also to real-world applications, including changes in tolerance to pesticides, freshwater salinization, invasive species, wildlife diseases, human health, and climate change. Thus, the insights from this research will provide societal benefits by furthering our understanding of how changes in morphology can evolve. The work will train 3 undergraduate students, involve summer high school and middle school teachers, and K-12 and public outreach efforts (including with underserved schools). This project will synthesize long-term data on natural environments to better understand how environmental variation impacts the future evolution of species traits. Using discoveries from over three decades of experiments on multiple species of tadpoles, which alter their morphology in different predator and competitor environments, I plan to synthesize that work with nearly two decades of data on environmental variation from long-term surveys of 40 ponds and wetlands in Michigan. The proposal has four major objectives: 1) examine whether the morphological changes observed in our experiments also occur in nature; 2) determine if variation in competition and predation in natural wetlands differs for each tadpole species and is associated with known morphological changes of each species; 3) investigate how different populations experience different amounts of natural variation in competition and predation over time, and 4) predict responses to natural selection in natural ponds by predators and competitors over time to see if it aligns with observations in prior experiments. Integrating these detailed and long-term datasets allows a synthesis that will address important and novel research questions, thereby adding value and new insights for current and future investigators.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.

许多动植物在时空上经历了可变的环境条件，它们可以通过以使其更适合当前环境的方式改变形状来做出响应。数十年的实验为植物和动物如何改变形状提供了深刻的见解，但我们对自然界中的“变形”物种的了解少得多。了解动植物如何发展在不同环境中改变其性状的能力不仅对生物学的基础研究，而且对现实世界中的应用，包括对农药的耐受性的变化，淡水盐水，入侵物种，野生动植物疾病，人类健康和气候变化。这是这项研究的见解将通过进一步了解形态变化如何发展来提供社会利益。这项工作将培训3名本科生，涉及夏季高中和中学教师，以及K-12以及公共外展工作（包括服务不足的学校）。该项目将综合自然环境的长期数据，以更好地了解环境变化如何影响物种特征的未来发展。我利用在多种t骨上的三十年实验中发现的发现，这些发现改变了它们在不同的捕食者和竞争者环境中的形态，我计划与密歇根州40个池塘和湿地的长期调查有关的近二十年的环境变化数据进行合成。该提案有四个主要目标：1）考试我们实验中观察到的形态变化是否也发生在自然界中； 2）确定每种t物种的自然湿地的竞争和捕食变化是否不同，并且与每种物种的已知形态变化有关； 3）研究不同人群如何随着时间的推移在竞争和捕食中经历不同量的自然变化，4）预测捕食者和竞争者随着时间的推移对自然熊的自然选择反应，以查看它是否与先前的实验中的观察结果保持一致。将这些详细和长期数据集整合在一起，可以综合解决重要和新颖的研究问题，从而为当前和未来的研究人员增加价值和新见解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛影响的评估来评估的。