Collaborative Proposal: MRA: Local- to continental-scale drivers of biodiversity across the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)

了解自然和人为因素如何影响生物多样性的地理格局，对于规划保护工作至关重要，特别是在面对快速的全球变化的情况下。生物多样性的地理格局预计将受到当地生物因素(如物种之间的竞争)和区域至大陆物理因素(如气候)的综合影响。然而，这一期望还没有从地方到大陆的不同物种谱系进行评估。此外，自然和人为的干扰可能会改变这种预期。这项研究使用美国国家生态观测网络(NEON)的地理设计来验证这一想法，通过在嵌套的空间尺度上量化影响小型哺乳动物、鱼类和地下甲虫生物多样性格局的多种生物和物理因素。这项研究将为霓虹灯添加新的公开可用的数据，包括测量动物身体大小、物种多样性，以及干扰和土地利用历史、气候、地质和地形的地理空间层。教学模块将强调使用霓虹灯数据所需的数据科学技能。本科生、研究生和博士后将直接参与研究。这项研究还将吸引公众，并通过与计算机科学专业的学生、自然历史博物馆和大型科学节开发的互动展览来提高公众对生物圈和环境变化的认识。拟议的研究将通过将个体生物特征的细粒度测量(如身体大小)与从地块到大陆尺度的跨尺度生物多样性驱动因素联系起来，推动生态学领域的发展。这项研究开发了一个概念框架，描述了体型、生物多样性的种内性状变异(ITV)与干扰、过去的土地利用及其相互作用相关的驱动因素之间的关系。这一框架将通过将ITV与不同尺度上的生物多样性驱动因素联系起来，推进空间生物多样性格局的基本理论和预测。三个主要问题包括：(1)空间尺度如何影响霓虹灯内不同类群的个体大小ITV及其与生物多样性的关系？(2)不同尺度的气候、地理多样性和土地覆盖以及霓虹灯过去的土地利用如何解释干扰机制？(3)气候、地球多样性和土地覆盖、过去土地利用、干扰机制和身体大小ITV之间的关系如何解释从局部到大陆尺度上不同类群之间的生物多样性差异？拟议的研究将满足霓虹灯内的一个主要研究需求，将干扰和土地利用历史数据从地块尺度量化到区域尺度。这些数据对解释观测生态数据至关重要，并将作为地理空间和表格数据库公开传播，其中包含用于连接其他霓虹区、地点和领域数据产品的代码。这些新的数据和生物多样性分析将有助于为未来与生态社区和ITV有关的时空霓虹灯数据产品建立基线。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。

Understanding how natural and human-made factors affect geographic patterns of biodiversity is essential for planning conservation efforts, especially in the face of rapid global changes. Geographic patterns of biodiversity are expected to be influenced by a combination of local biological factors, like competition among species, and by regional to continental physical factors, such as climate. However, this expectation has not been evaluated from local to continental scales across diverse species lineages. In addition, natural and human-made disturbances are likely to alter this expectation. This study uses the geographic design of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) across the USA to test this idea, by quantifying multiple biological and physical factors affecting biodiversity patterns of small mammals, fish, and ground beetles at nested spatial scales. The study will add new, publicly available data to NEON including measures of animal body sizes, species diversity, and geospatial layers for disturbance and land use histories, climate, geology, and topography. Teaching modules will highlight data science skills needed to work with NEON data. Undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs will engage directly with the research. The study will also engage the public and increase awareness of the biosphere and environmental change with an interactive exhibit for Science on a Sphere developed with computer science students, a natural history museum, and a large science festival.The proposed research will advance the field of ecology by connecting fine-grained measurements of individual organism traits, like body size, to cross-scale drivers of biodiversity from plot to continental scales. This research develops a conceptual framework that describes relationships among intraspecific trait variation (ITV) in body size, biodiversity, and drivers related to disturbance, past land use, and their interactions. This framework will advance basic theory and prediction of spatial biodiversity patterns by linking ITV to drivers of biodiversity across scales. Three main questions include: (1) How does spatial scale influence body size ITV and its relationship with biodiversity across taxa within NEON? (2) How is disturbance regime explained by different scales of climate, geodiversity and land cover, and past land use across NEON? (3) How do relationships among climate, geodiversity and land cover, past land use, disturbance regime, and body size ITV explain variation in biodiversity across taxa from local to continental scales? The proposed research will meet a major research need within NEON, to quantify disturbance and land use history data from the plot to the domain scale. Such data are essential to interpretation of observational ecological data and will be publicly disseminated as a geospatial and tabular database containing code for linking other NEON plot, site, and domain data products. These new data and biodiversity analyses will serve to establish a baseline for future spatiotemporal NEON data products that concern ecological communities and ITV.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.