Collaborative Research: ORCC: LIVING WITH EXTREMES - PREDICTING ECOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN A HIGH-ALTITUDE ALPINE SONGBIRD

野生动物应对气候变化的能力取决于以下三件事中的一件或多件：迁移到合适的地区，通过进化适应，或调整行为和生理。随着气温上升，气候变化可能会迫使山顶野生动物走上“走向灭绝的扶梯”，因为没有更高海拔的选择。这个项目研究了两种相关的山顶鸣禽，褐冠红腹雀和内华达山脉灰冠红腹雀，是如何结合这些策略，在极端的高山环境中长期专注和坚持下去的。它使用博物馆标本来建立气候变化前的基线和实地调查，以探索每种鸣禽在高海拔范围内的当前应对策略是如何变化的。该项目将这些发现与气候变化预测相结合，通过一个综合统计模型来预测未来的反应，该模型将运动、进化和行为变化（如每年养育子女和饮食时间的变化）纳入其中。目前，缺乏关于罗斯雀（RF）的基本信息阻碍了州和联邦机构的管理。该项目将向美国西部的伙伴机构提供量身定制的报告和数据产品，以便将研究结果和模型方法纳入决策。该项目还将通过UCSC多丽丝·杜克保护学者计划和推进辅导探究机会中心（CAMINO）每年为四名本科生提供暑期实地研究实习机会，该中心为STEM领域边缘化背景的学生提供服务，并培养一名研究生和两名博士后成为科学家和不同学生的有效导师。虽然关于高海拔物种灭绝和范围缩小的报道日益广泛，但人们对基因流动和局部适应在避免灭绝中的潜在作用以及允许个体应对和影响其生态进化反应的行为反应的关注较少。相应地，虽然通过物种分布模型确定范围变化能力的方法在过去几十年中稳步发展，但将适应能力、可塑性和分布变化纳入预测物种对环境变化反应的统一框架的能力仍然有限。对两个红雀亚种的统计、基因组和生态学方法的整合将解决基本的生态进化问题：自然选择如何跨越空间和时间来限制物种分布？在极端环境专家中，生态和进化约束对气候变化响应的作用是什么？该项目将整合空间数据和博物馆标本的历史数据，建立一个机制的、层次的遗传、表型和生态对气候变化的响应及其反馈模型。这项工作还将有助于确定生物标志物，以了解高高山鸟类专家的气候耐受性。最后，该项目将通过改进工具来预测物种分布和丰度，并在考虑管理需求时包括空间和时间的生物变化，从而为rose - finch以及更广泛的气候变化下的野生动物管理提供信息。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。

The ability of wildlife to cope with climate change depends on the capacity to do one or more of three things: move to suitable areas, adapt through evolution, or adjust behavior and physiology. Climate change can force mountaintop wildlife onto an “escalator to extinction” as temperatures rise, because no higher-elevation options exist. This project examines how two related mountaintop songbirds, the Brown-capped Rosy-Finch and the Sierra Nevada Gray-Crowned Rosy-Finch, have combined these strategies to specialize and persist in extreme alpine environments over time. It uses museum specimens to establish a pre-climate change baseline and field surveys to explore how current coping strategies vary across the high-elevation range of each songbird. The project integrates these findings with climate change projections to forecast future responses through an integrated statistical model incorporating movement, evolutionary, and behavior changes such as shifts in annual timing of parenting and diet. Absence of basic information about Rosy-Finches (RF) currently hinders management by state and federal agencies. The project will deliver tailored reports and data products to partner agencies in the western United States to enable uptake of findings and model approaches into decision-making. The project will also provide summer field research internships to four undergraduate students each year through the UCSC Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program and Center to Advance Mentored, Inquiry-based Opportunities (CAMINO), which serve students from marginalized backgrounds in STEM, and train a graduate student and two postdoctoral fellows as scientists and effective mentors for diverse students. While reports of extirpations and range contractions in high-altitude species are increasingly widespread, less attention has been paid to the potential roles of gene flow and local adaptation in extinction avoidance, and of behavioral responses that could both allow individuals to cope and influence their eco-evolutionary responsiveness. Correspondingly, while the methodology for determining the capacity for range shifts through species distribution modeling has developed steadily over the last several decades, the ability to incorporate the capacity for adaptation, plasticity, and distributional shifts into a unified framework for forecasting species responses to environmental change remains limited. The integration of statistical, genomic, and ecological approaches across two Rosy-Finch subspecies will address fundamental eco-evolutionary questions: How does natural selection operate across space and time to constrain species distributions? What are the roles of ecological and evolutionary constraints on climate change response in extreme-environment specialists? The project will integrate spatial data with historical data from museum specimens to build a mechanistic, hierarchical model of genetic, phenotypic, and ecological responses to climate change and feedbacks among them. The work will also help identify biomarkers for understanding climate tolerance across high-alpine bird specialists. Finally, the project will inform Rosy-Finch as well as broader wildlife management under climate change by refining tools to forecast species distributions and abundances and including spatial and temporal organismal variation in considering management needs.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.