RII Track-4: Collaborative partnerships at the cusp of wildlife ecology and molecular biology

这项研究基础设施改善RII Track-4拨款将研究黄石国家公园的迁徙野生动物如何根据季节变化调整它们的食物。科学家们需要了解野生动物吃的植物是如何为迁徙提供燃料的，以便预测迁徙野生动物的多样性及其选择的路线可能会发生什么变化。对于大型野生动物，如野牛和叉角羚，这一点尤其重要，它们自然会在公共和私人土地上进行长距离迁徙。该项目将使用尖端分子技术对五种野生动物在季节性迁徙过程中捕食的食用植物进行法医鉴定。这项工作的每一步都将加强罗德岛州的大学教学，加强跨多个司法管辖区的学术与政府合作，并积极改变调查员的职业轨迹。这项拟议的工作建立了一个新的以课程为基础的本科生研究计划，加强了在布朗大学进行指导研究的机会和包容性。与国家公园管理局的科学家合作，学生们将开发法医方法来表征动物的饮食并公开报告结果。这些目标将确保培训一支拥有开发和交流快速基因测试类型所需经验的多样化劳动力，这些测试在现代环境科学、医疗保健和流行病学中至关重要。野生动物生物学和分子生物学中出现的新方法可以帮助推动从单个动物行为到整个生态系统功能的跨尺度生态学的发展。众所周知，动物饮食在这些范围内都很重要，因为食物的可获得性既影响个体的行动，也影响许多物种在资源有限的世界中共存的能力。然而，以这些不同尺度中的每一个为重点而发展起来的理论框架，可能会产生关于物种将如何应对环境变化的相互矛盾的预测。在这项提案中，我们的重点是调和对来自黄石国家公园的一群迁徙的大型草食动物的饮食季节性的预测，黄石国家公园是北美最多样化的大型食草动物群落。我们的建议将研究人员在饮食DNA代谢编码方面的专业知识与宿主站点的长期GPS跟踪和现场实验数据结合起来。我们将测试以下假设：(1)季节性饮食变化在从个体到食物网的尺度上是可预测的，(2)季节性植物-草食动物相互作用中的反馈调节了这些尺度上的饮食重叠和专业化。这位研究员、博士后研究助理和布朗大学的学生将与国家公园管理局的科学家合作检验这些假说。在这一过程中，该团队将产生并公开一套对研究和教育具有长生命周期有用的生物资源，包括数字标本馆收藏和一个DNA参考库，这些资源与多个EPSCOR辖区相关。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。

This Research Infrastructure Improvement RII Track-4 grant will examine how the migratory wildlife of Yellowstone National Park adjust their diets in response to seasonal change. Scientists need to understand how the plants that wild animals eat are able to fuel migrations in order to anticipate how the diversity of migratory wildlife and the routes that they select might change. This is especially important for large wildlife, such as bison and pronghorn antelope, that naturally engage in long-distance migrations across both public and private lands. This project will use cutting-edge molecular technologies to forensically identify the food plants that five species of wildlife eat during the course of their seasonal migrations. Each step of the work will enhance university teaching within Rhode Island, strengthen academic-government collaboration across multiple jurisdictions, and positively transform the career trajectory of the investigator. The proposed work establishes a new course-based undergraduate research program that enhances access and inclusion in mentored research at Brown University. In collaboration with scientists from the National Park Service, students will develop forensic methods to characterize animal diets and report results publicly. These goals will ensure the training of a diverse workforce with the experience needed to develop and communicate about the types of rapid genetic tests that are essential in modern environmental science, healthcare, and epidemiology.Approaches emerging in wildlife biology and molecular biology can help advance ecology across scales from individual animal behaviors to the functioning of entire ecosystems. Animal diets are known to be important across these scales because food availability influences both individual movements and the ability of many species to coexist in a world of limited resources. However, theoretical frameworks that have developed with a focus on each of these different scales can generate conflicting predictions about how species will respond to environmental change. In this proposal, we focus on reconciling predictions about seasonality in the diets of an extensively studied assemblage of migratory large herbivores from Yellowstone National Park, which is North America’s most diverse large-herbivore community. Our proposal combines the investigator’s expertise in dietary DNA metabarcoding with the host site’s long-term GPS-tracking and field experimental data. We will test the hypotheses that (1) seasonal dietary shifts are predictable at scales spanning individuals to food webs and (2) feedbacks in seasonal plant-herbivore interactions modulate dietary overlap and specialization across these scales. The investigator, postdoctoral research associate, and students at Brown University will collaborate with scientists from the National Park Service to test these hypotheses. In the process, the team will generate and make publicly available a suite of biological resources that will have a long lifecycle of usefulness to research and education, including digital herbarium collections and a DNA reference library that are relevant across multiple EPSCoR jurisdictions.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.