EVO-LTER: Leveraging long-term ecological research in grasslands: facilitating collaborations between ecologists and evolutionary biologists

重要的是要了解物种将如何应对地球快速变化的环境。在长期生态研究(LTER)地点，物种和环境条件已经被研究了几十年。因此，这些遗址为研究适应环境变化提供了极好的机会。不幸的是，这样的研究很难开展，因为在LTER地点工作的进化生物学家太少了。该项目的主要目标是将进化生物学家和LTER生态学家聚集在一起，开始新的、令人兴奋的研究，将这两个学科结合起来。这将通过在新墨西哥大学塞维莱塔野战站举行的为期四天的研讨会来完成。与会者将有充足的时间通过多种类型的活动形成新的职业关系。早期职业教师、博士后和研究生的参与将是特色，因为他们代表了LTER地点进化生态学的未来。社会面临的复杂环境问题要求在科学学科之间架起这样的桥梁。在研讨会上，与会者将开发新的想法和方法，以利用现有的LTER资源和基础设施进行进化研究。第一个目标将是确定利用LTER站点的现有实验、样本和基础设施进行进化研究的“最佳实践”。第二个目标将是制定一个框架，在与LTER遗址相关的背景下指导新的生态进化研究。第三个目标将是为LTER遗址未来的生态进化研究确定有希望的途径，并召集一个较小的小组来设想未来对这项研究的支持。第四个目标将是通过设计和教授一个有研讨会参与者的分布式研究生研讨会，增加研究生在LTER地点进行进化研究的机会。为了更好地促进新的合作，参与者将包括LTER地点的知名生态学家和进化生物学家，他们中的许多人以前没有LTER经验。总的来说，这些努力将为未来的科学发现提供一个研究框架。这一奖项反映了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。

It is important to understand how species will respond to Earth’s rapidly changing conditions. At Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites, species and environmental conditions have been studied for decades. These sites thus provide a wonderful opportunity to study adaptation in response to environmental changes. Unfortunately, it is hard to get such studies off the ground because so few evolutionary biologists work at LTER sites. The main goal of this project is to bring together evolutionary biologists and LTER ecologists to start new and exciting studies that unite the two disciplines. This will be done through a four-day workshop at the University of New Mexico’s Sevilleta Field Station. Attendees will have plenty of time to form new professional relationships through many types of activities. Participation of early career faculty, postdocs and graduate students will be featured, as they represent the future of evolutionary ecology at LTER sites. The complex environmental problems faced by society call for building such bridges between scientific disciplines. At the workshop, participants will develop novel ideas and methodological approaches to leverage existing LTER resources and infrastructure for evolutionary research. The first goal will be to identify ‘best practices’ for leveraging existing experiments, samples, and infrastructure at LTER sites for evolutionary research. The second goal will be to develop a framework to guide new eco-evolutionary research in a context relevant to LTER sites. The third goal will be to identify promising avenues for future eco-evolutionary research at LTER sites and to convene a smaller group to envision future support for the research. The fourth goal will be to increase exposure of graduate students to evolutionary research at LTER sites by designing and teaching a distributed graduate seminar with workshop participants. To best facilitate new collaborations, participants will include established ecologists at LTER sites and evolutionary biologists, many of whom have no prior LTER experience. Collectively, these efforts will provide a research framework for future scientific discovery.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.