Collaborative Research: RoL: Detecting and predicting the relative contributions of fecundity and survival to fitness in changing environments

这项研究将解决一个紧迫的社会需求，即准确预测生物对环境变化的反应。该项目旨在通过调查动物如何对平均环境条件和短期极端环境条件的变化做出反应来改进预测技术。随着时间的推移，平均环境条件决定了能量获得率和随后的繁殖率，而生存可能受到短期极端环境条件的强烈影响。在许多物种中，生殖和生存在决定适合度方面的相对重要性会沿着环境梯度系统地变化。 沿着山坡，在高海拔地区，繁殖受到短而凉爽的生长季节的限制，而在夏季，由于极端高温，低海拔地区的生存受到挑战。 该项目的目标是开发一种通用的建模方法，可以连接生物组织，空间和时间的水平，以预测生存和繁殖限制的变化，从而提高我们预测对环境梯度和变化的反应的能力。该项目将大大扩大两个教育和外联项目。TrEnCh项目（trenchproject.github.io）将开发和分享额外的计算和可视化工具，以将环境变化转化为生物影响。甲壳虫项目提供了研究气候变化应对措施的实践模块，将重点扩大英语识字水平和社会经济地位的教育机会。此外，该项目将提供进化生态学，基因组学，生理学和定量技能的综合培训，以高中，本科，研究生和博士后学生的不同群体。 该项目将利用调查和标本数据，从最近和历史时期，在一个蝗虫物种的组合发现沿着山区海拔梯度，不同的特点，如扩散，物候，形态和热专业化。田间相互移植实验将量化对环境的综合反应，同时评估当地的适应性和可塑性是否适度的繁殖和生存的限制沿着环境梯度。移植将使用生理和基因组生物标志物来测试生存限制在低海拔地区占主导地位，而生殖限制在高海拔地区占主导地位的假设。实验室常见的花园实验操纵随海拔变化的环境属性（温度，温度变化，光周期，辐射，缺氧）将测试生理机制，健身约束的基础。模型构建将整合这些生理机制，以预测对海拔梯度的反应。然后，历史调查和标本数据将被用来测试这些模型是否成功地后推模式的遗传，生理，表型，和人口的反应，以50年的环境变化。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得支持，通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

The research will address an urgent societal need, which is to accurately predict biological responses to environmental change. This project aims to improve prediction techniques by investigating how animals respond to shifts in both average environmental conditions and short-term, extreme environmental conditions. Average environmental conditions over time determine rates of energy gain and subsequently reproductive rates, whereas survival can be strongly influenced by short-term, extreme environmental conditions. In many species, the relative importance of reproduction and survival in determining fitness change systematically along environmental gradients. Along a mountain slope, reproduction is constrained at high altitudes by a short, cool, growing season, while survival is challenged at low altitudes in summer due to hot temperature extremes. The project goal is to develop a general modeling approach that can bridge levels of biological organization, space and time to predict shifts in survival and reproduction constraints and thus improve our ability to forecast responses to environmental gradients and change. The project will greatly expand two education and outreach projects. The TrEnCh project (trenchproject.github.io) will develop and share additional computational and visualization tools to Translate Environmental Change into biological impacts. The Beetle Project, offering hands-on modules to study climate change responses, will focus on expanding educational access across levels of English literacy and socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the project will provide integrative training in evolutionary ecology, genomics, physiology, and quantitative skills to a diverse group of high school, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. The project will leverage survey and specimen data, from recent and historical periods, in an assemblage of grasshopper species found along a montane elevation gradient that vary in traits such as dispersal, phenology, morphology, and thermal specialization. Field reciprocal transplant experiments will quantify the integrated response to the environment, while assessing whether local adaptation and plasticity moderate reproduction and survival constraints along the environmental gradient. The transplants will use physiological and genomic biomarkers to test the hypothesis that survival constraints predominate at low elevations, while reproduction constraints predominate at high elevations. Lab common garden experiments manipulating environmental attributes that vary with elevation (temperature, temperature variability, photoperiod, radiation, hypoxia) will test physiological mechanisms that underlie fitness constraints. Model building will integrate these physiological mechanisms to predict responses to the elevation gradient. Then, historic survey and specimen data will be used to test whether these models successfully hindcast patterns of genetic, physiological, phenotypic, and demographic responses to 50 years of environmental change.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.