EAGER: Environmental drivers of biodiversity: leveraging a history of NSF-funded research to test models of butterfly responses to global change

我们最紧迫的生态优先事项是确定人类活动如何推动全球生物多样性的变化，以及我们如何在保护生态系统功能与不断增长的人口需求之间取得平衡。PI建议对过去40年来一直是热反应研究主题的粉蝶科蝴蝶进行新的生态研究。 本研究的总体目标是扩展和推广物种分布模型（SDM），这是了解生物多样性在全球变化中大规模变化的主要建模方法。 PI将利用40年的热响应研究遗产，开发蝴蝶如何应对不断变化的环境的一般模型。 为了验证这些模型的运行情况及其进行特定物种和一般预测的能力，将用大规模监测数据集验证这些模型。 公民科学监测数据的资源越来越多，但多年来也有几个NSF资助的学术监测项目。 该项目的另一个方面是将这些学术和公民科学数据汇集到一个统一的公开数据集。 这项研究预计将推进热生态学和生物多样性，特别是外温动物的响应的宏观系统生态学研究，同时也作为一个强有力的示范数据重用的重点放在一个研究和广泛传播的蝴蝶物种，粉蝶。在宏观系统生态学的研究需要两种不同的生态数据类型，很少产生或采用相同的研究社区：机械，实验数据和数据从大型时空复制监测计划。驱动蝴蝶分布和数量的两个主要环境因素是热环境（受气候影响）和寄主植物可用性（受土地利用变化和气候影响）。有14个以前和现在的NSF资助的项目主要集中在热，但也在一个家庭的蝴蝶，粉蝶的性能营养驱动程序。热环境对蝴蝶的性能有几个影响。温度间接地驱动着寄主植物（食物）资源的季节性时间和分布。它还为毛虫的生长提供能量。寄主植物也是蝴蝶发育的关键组成部分，这不仅仅是因为它们从这些植物中获得所有生长所需的营养，而且植物的质量也决定了它们的生长速度。关于许多昆虫生长的热量和营养限制的研究由来已久，但这些模型尚未完全用于对蝴蝶进行广泛的预测。我们建议将NSF资助的蝴蝶对环境变化的反应研究的遗产与长期监测数据结合起来，这些数据可以分别用于在多个时空尺度上生成和测试机制SDM。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Our most pressing ecological priority is to determine how human activity is driving global shifts in biodiversity and how we can balance preserving ecosystem function with the needs of a growing human population. The PI proposes new ecological research on the Pierid family of butterflies that have been the subject of research on thermal responses over the last 40 years. The overarching goal of this research is to extend and generalize Species Distribution Models (SDM), the dominant modeling approach to understanding large-scale shifts of biodiversity in the face of global change. The PI will leverage that 40 year legacy of thermal response research to develop general models of how butterflies respond to changing environments. In order to verify how well these models perform and their ability to make both species-specific and general predictions, models will be validated with large-scale monitoring data sets. There is a growing resource of citizen-science monitoring data but there are also several NSF-funded academic monitoring programs that have occurred over the years. Another aspect of this project is to bring together those academic and citizen science data into a unified publicly-available data set. The research is expected to advance macrosystems ecology study of thermal ecology and responses of biodiversity, especially ectotherms while also serving as a strong demonstration of data reuse by focusing on a well-studied and wide-spread group of butterfly species, the Pierids. Research in macrosystems ecology requires two disparate ecological data types that are rarely generated or employed by the same research community: mechanistic, experimental data and data from large spatiotemporally-replicated monitoring programs. The two dominant environmental factors driving the distribution and abundance of butterflies are thermal environment (impacted by climate) and host-plant availability (impacted by land use change and climate). There are 14 previous and current NSF-funded projects focused on primarily thermal, but also nutritional drivers of performance in one family of butterflies, Pierids. Thermal environments have several impacts on butterfly performance. Indirectly, temperature drives the seasonal timing and distribution of host-plant (food) resources. It also provides energy for growth for developing caterpillars. Host-plants are also a key component of butterfly development, not just for the obvious reason that they acquire all their nutrition for growth from these plants, but the quality of the plants also determines their growth rate. There has been a long legacy of research on the thermal and nutritional constraints of growth for many insects, but these models have not yet been fully employed to make range-wide predictions for butterflies. We propose to bring together a legacy of NSF-funded research on butterfly responses to environmental change with long-term monitoring data that can be used, respectively, to generate and test mechanistic SDMs over multiple spatiotemporal scales.This project is supported by the National Science Foundation?s Public Access Initiative which is managed by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure on behalf of the Foundation.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.