Collaborative Research: ORCC: Harnessing Adaptive Variation in Drought Resistance Strategies to Manage Populations Under Climate Change

面对气候变化，保护生物多样性是一项重大的社会挑战，土地管理者在努力维持自然资源的同时，每天都面临着如何做到这一点的决定。气候变化正在增加平均气温，并改变严重干旱等极端事件发生的频率和强度。极端事件对植物等活动有限的生物体尤其具有挑战性，可能导致生物多样性的持久丧失，甚至局部灭绝。考虑到预测的未来环境的管理和保护行动是必要的，但对于这些行动应该是什么以及应该指导它们的生物学原则几乎没有共识。这一挑战的存在部分是因为研究什么特征使植物能够承受这些极端气候事件是困难的;极端干旱的发生是不可预测的，但必须事先获得数据或实验资源来评估事件的影响。这项拟议的研究将利用十年来收集的普通猴花Mimulus guttatus，这些猴花是在2010年代美国西部经历严重的多年干旱之前，期间和之后制作的。通过研究哪些遗传变异和特征有助于不同种群适应不同地点之间的长期湿度差异以及这种严重的当代事件，拟议的研究将揭示可能使种群在未来气候中保持弹性的策略。这些预测将在实地研究中得到检验。通过与土地管理人员的研讨会，项目设计将由相关利益攸关方提供信息，其结果随后将为他们的决定提供信息。拟议的研究将解决这一首要问题：什么样的遗传和生物体调整抗旱战略将促进当地人口对气候变化的适应能力？M.在干旱胁迫的季节性时间和严重程度变化很大的地区，虽然M. Guttatus种群显示出适应干旱空间变化的多种遗传和生物特征，最近的研究发现，随着气候变化对历史干旱制度造成越来越严重的破坏，它们正在变得局部适应不良。该项目将集中描述遗传变异如何通过调控网络自适应地调整生物体策略以适应当地条件，并询问在2010年代美国西部干旱期间展开的各种生态进化过程是否可以通过历史干旱强度的局部变化，当地常设遗传变异或种子库动态来解释。具体而言，人口基因组分析和深入的复活实验将评估基因和形态，转录组学和生理生态性状在这场严重的干旱事件演变。干旱相关的等位基因如何适应性地调整这些性状将通过基因编辑进行功能测试，操纵性田间实验将评估这些遗传和生物因素如何在当前和预测的未来干旱状况下增强适应性。所有实验将围绕一组常见的基因型进行，由此产生的协同作用将使预测框架的建设和验证，包括遗传和生物数据到辅助基因流的做法，作为一种手段，以促进人口对气候变化的适应能力，并告知关键的保护决策。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的支持，知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

Preserving biological diversity in the face of climate change is a major societal challenge, and land managers face daily decisions about how to do so as they strive to sustain natural resources. Climate change is increasing average temperatures and also changing how often and how intensely extreme events like severe droughts occur. Extreme events are particularly challenging for organisms with limited movement like plants, potentially causing enduring losses of diversity or even local extinctions. Management and conservation actions that take predicted future environments into account are necessary, but there is little consensus on what these actions should be and what biological principles should guide them. This challenge exists in part because studying what traits allow plants to withstand these extreme climate events is difficult; extreme droughts occur unpredictably, yet data or experimental resources must be obtained beforehand to assess the event’s impact. The proposed research will take advantage of a decade of collections of the common monkeyflower, Mimulus guttatus, made before, during, and after a severe, multi-year drought experienced in the 2010s in the Western US. Through studying what genetic variants and characteristics have helped adapt different populations to long-term differences in moisture among sites and also to this severe contemporary event, the proposed research will reveal strategies that may allow populations to remain resilient in future climates. These predictions will be tested in field studies. Through workshops with land managers, the project design will be informed by relevant stakeholders, and the results will subsequently inform their decisions.The proposed research will address this overarching question: what genetic and organismal adjustments to drought resistance strategies will promote local population resilience to changing climates? Annual populations of M. guttatus, are widespread but patchily distributed across a landscape over which the seasonal timing and severity of drought stress is highly variable. Although M. guttatus populations show multiple genetic and organismal signatures of adaptation to spatial variation in aridity, recent work has found they are becoming locally maladapted as climate change causes increasingly drastic disruptions to historical drought regimes. The project will intensively characterize how genetic variation acts through regulatory networks to adaptively tune organismal strategies to local conditions and ask whether the varied eco-evolutionary processes that unfolded during the 2010s Western US drought are explained by local variation in historical drought intensity, local standing genetic variation, or seed bank dynamics. Specifically, population genomic analyses and in-depth resurrection experiments will assess how genes and morphological, transcriptomic, and ecophysiological traits evolved during this severe drought event. How drought-associated alleles adaptively adjust these traits will be tested functionally by gene editing, and manipulative field experiments will evaluate how these genetic and organismal factors enhance fitness under current and predicted future drought regimes. All experiments will be structured around a common set of genotypes, and the resulting synergy will enable construction and validation of predictive frameworks for inclusion of genetic and organismal data into assisted gene flow practices as a means to promote population resilience to climate change and inform critical conservation decisions.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.