RUI/Collaborative Research: MSB-ECA: Mice-o-scapes: Using isotopes to understand the effect of climate and landscape change on small mammal ecology over the past 100 years

在过去的100年里，气候、植被和土地利用的变化对美国的环境和物种生态产生了巨大的影响。了解这些影响对于指导未来的保护和管理决策以及制定评估生态系统健康的指标是必要的。虽然许多工作都集中在生态系统对地方或区域尺度上的这些变化的反应，但在气候和景观变化如何影响大陆尺度上的生态系统方面仍存在许多问题。小型哺乳动物，如啮齿动物，在北美哺乳动物物种中占很大比例，是生态系统变化的领头羊。小型哺乳动物通过稳定同位素在组织中记录了它们的饮食和环境的许多方面，但关键问题仍然是关于小型哺乳动物同位素所代表的空间尺度和它们记录的环境的方面，这项工作将填补我们对小型哺乳动物在大陆尺度上记录的稳定同位素的气候和环境控制的理解的重大空白。 具体来说，我们将结合联合收割机地球化学和建模技术，使用从国家生态观测网络（氖）获得的现代标本与自然历史博物馆的历史标本相结合。 我们将确定小型哺乳动物的同位素组成如何随大陆尺度的气候和植被梯度而变化，并创造老鼠景观？同位素景观模型预测美国各地小型哺乳动物毛发的稳定同位素组成。这些景观模型将使我们能够更好地了解小型哺乳动物记录的空间尺度和环境变量，以及物种之间的饮食差异。然后，我们将使用从各种博物馆收藏获得的历史小型哺乳动物标本，以评估小型哺乳动物如何应对从世纪末到现在的环境变化。我们将针对美国的四个不同地区，这些地区在过去100年中经历了巨大但不同形式的土地利用变化，包括城市化，农业扩张，森林砍伐和草地-牧场过渡。该项目强调将博物馆收藏品作为生态变化档案与氖网络相结合的重要性，同时帮助建立年轻女性研究团队的职业生涯，并增加西班牙裔服务机构中代表性不足的少数民族的研究机会。

Climate, vegetation, and land-use change have had a dramatic impact on environments and species ecology across the United States over the past 100 years. Understanding these impacts is necessary for guiding future conservation and management decisions, and for developing indicators to assess ecosystem health. While much work has focused on the response of ecosystems to these changes on local or regional scales, many questions remain as to how climate and landscape changes will affect ecosystems at a continental scale. Small mammals, such as rodents, represent a significant proportion of the mammalian species in North America, and are bellweathers of ecosystem change. Small mammals record many aspects of their diet and environment in their tissues via stable isotopes, but key questions remain about the spatial scale represented by small-mammal isotopes and the aspects of the environment that they record.This work will fill a major gap in our understanding of the climatic and environmental controls on stable isotopes recorded by small mammals at a continental scale. Specifically, we will combine biogeochemistry and modeling techniques using modern specimens obtained from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) combined with historical specimens from natural history museums. We will determine how the isotopic composition of small mammals varies in relation to continental-scale climate and vegetation gradients and create mice-o-scapes?isotope landscape models predicting the stable isotopic composition of small-mammal hair across the United States. These landscape models will allow us to better understand the spatial scales and environmental variables recorded by small mammals, as well as differences in diet among species. We will then use historical small-mammal specimens obtained from various museum collections to assess how small mammals have responded to environmental change from the late 19th century to the present. We will target four different regions of the United States that have undergone dramatic but different forms of land-use change over the past 100 years, including urbanization, agricultural expansion, deforestation, and grassland-rangeland transition. This project emphasizes the importance of integrating museum collections as archives of ecological change with the NEON network, while helping to establish the careers of the young female research team and increasing research opportunities for underrepresented minorities at a Hispanic-serving institution.