Environmental data loggers for ecological-genetic field experiments

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Evolution by natural selection happens when genetic variation among individuals of a species interacts with environmental variation in physical and biological factors to cause variation in survival and reproductive success, or what biologists call fitness. Investigating the agents of natural selection in the wild requires good estimates of both genetic variability and variability in the environment. Recently the ability of ecologists to quantify variation in key environmental factors such as temperature, light and water availability has been greatly enhanced by low-cost, high-resolution, digital data loggers with the capacity to store thousands of measurements over long periods of time under natural conditions. This NSERC Research Tools & Instrumentation Grant requests funding for environmental data loggers to measure both coarse- and fine-scale spatial variation in temperature, light and soil moisture in natural habitats to enhance our research investigating the evolution of plant life history and reproductive strategy. Our recent work uses ecological-genetic field experiments to test hypotheses concerning: (1) how natural selection creates adaptive intraspecific variation in mating system in response to spatial variation in climate and interactions with other species (particularly pollinators); and (2) the ecological and genetic factors that cause evolutionary limits to the geographical distribution of plant species. The proposed package of data logging equipment (HOBO microstation and Pro v2 loggers) will enable us to quantify large-scale climatic variation among experimental field sites as well as finer-scale variation in temperature within sites, and thereby test of a variety of unresolved ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. This equipment is cost-effective and has an excellent reputation for performance in ecological experiments. In addition to enabling new experimental approaches, thereby enhancing scientific discovery, the proposed equipment will create opportunities for training students in the spatial analysis of environmental variation, an extremely valuable skill in many areas of fundamental science as well as applications in conservation and agricultural biotechnology.