BEE: Demographic and evolutionary consequences of phenological tracking

植物有很多方式来决定它们所经历的环境。这种“追踪”环境的能力改变了生态和进化。这是因为它改变了个体的生存，并决定了环境如何对特征施加自然选择。植物可以通过调整生长的季节来适应环境，从而控制它们所处的环境。具体来说，种子发芽的时间决定了植物一生中所接触到的环境。了解发芽时间等性状如何对变化的条件作出反应，对农业和保护生物学都很重要。本研究利用不同的种群通过发芽线索跟踪季节环境的能力，量化环境跟踪调整对种群生长和适应的影响程度。通过这种方式，它将提供对不断变化的环境对重要资源的影响的批判性理解。此外，该项目将通过培训从k-12到研究生院的各种学生，产生社会影响。它还将为农业和保护生物学专业人员提供基础信息。众所周知，环境跟踪是使生物在环境变化和范围扩大的条件下持续存在的关键过程。这项研究允许对这种理论进行明确的测试，并将阐明影响生物在环境变化条件下生存和适应能力的基本过程。该项目使用具有相似遗传组成的复制的、遗传可变的种群来对比种群的持久性、生长、灭绝、适应速度以及休眠和非休眠种群之间遗传组成的变化。除了控制种子休眠的主要基因位点不同之外，休眠处理将在基因上相同，这允许季节性环境跟踪。此外，它将确定与适应不同环境条件相关的特定性状和遗传位点，并测试这些性状和基因位点是否取决于种群以前通过发芽线索跟踪季节性环境条件的能力。阐明物候环境追踪本身在不同环境条件下的演化过程。因此，该研究项目测试了环境因素和物候调节等普遍存在的过程如何改变整个基因组和整个生命周期的适应性，以及它们如何改变种群的持久性和表现。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

Plants have many ways of determining the environment they experience. This ability to “track” environments alters ecology and evolution. This is because it changes the survival of individuals and determines how the environment exerts natural selection on traits. Plants can control which environments they are exposed to by adjusting the seasonal timing of development in response to the environment. Specifically, the timing of seed germination determines what a plant is exposed to throughout its life. Understanding how traits like germination timing will respond to changing conditions is important for both agriculture and conservation biology. This research uses populations that differ in their ability to track seasonal environments via germination cuing, to quantify the degree to which environmental tracking adjustment influence population growth and adaptation. In this way it will provide critical understanding of the influence of a changing environment on important resources. The project will, furthermore, provide societal impacts by training a diverse set of students from k-12 through graduate school. It will also provide fundamental information to professionals in agriculture and conservation biology. Environmental tracking is known to be a crucial process that allows organisms to persist under conditions of environmental change and range expansion. This research allows explicit tests of such theory and will elucidate fundamental processes that influence the ability of organisms to persist and adapt under conditions of environmental change. This project uses replicated, genetically variable, populations of similar genetic composition to contrast population persistence, growth, extinction, rates of adaptation, and changes in genetic composition between dormant and non-dormant populations. The dormancy treatments will be genetically identical with the exception of differences in major genetic loci that control seed dormancy, which allows seasonal environmental tracking. In addition, it will identify specific traits and genetic loci associated with adaptation to contrasting environmental conditions, and to test whether those traits and loci differ depending on the population’s previous ability to track seasonal environmental conditions via germination cuing. It will elucidate how phenological environmental tracking itself evolves under diverse environmental conditions. This research program therefore tests how ubiquitous processes such as environmental cuing and phenological regulation can alter adaptation across the genome and across the lifecycle, and how they alter population persistence and performance.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.