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

野生动物科普气候变化的能力取决于做以下三件事中的一件或多件的能力：迁移到合适的地区，通过进化适应，或调整行为和生理。随着气温的升高，气候变化可能会迫使山顶野生动物走上“灭绝的自动扶梯”，因为没有更高海拔的选择。本项目研究了两种相关的山顶鸣禽，棕顶玫瑰雀和塞拉利昂内华达州灰冠玫瑰雀，如何结合这些策略，随着时间的推移，专门化和坚持在极端的高山环境。它使用博物馆标本来建立气候变化前的基线，并进行实地调查，以探索目前的应对策略如何在每种鸣禽的高海拔范围内变化。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预测未来的反应，该模型将运动，进化和行为变化（如育儿和饮食的年度时间变化）结合起来。缺乏有关玫瑰雀（RF）的基本信息，目前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，以便将调查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中心每年为四名本科生提供夏季实地研究实习，以促进指导，基于调查的机会（CAMINO），为STEM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研究员作为科学家和不同学生的有效导师。虽然高海拔物种灭绝和范围收缩的报道越来越普遍，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行为反应的关注较少，这些行为反应可以让个体科普并影响其生态进化反应。相应地，虽然通过物种分布模型确定范围转移能力的方法在过去几十年中稳步发展，但将适应能力、可塑性和分布转移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。整合统计，基因组和生态方法在两个Rosy-Finch亚种将解决基本的生态进化问题：自然选择如何在空间和时间上限制物种分布？极端环境专家对气候变化反应的生态和进化限制的作用是什么？该项目将把空间数据与博物馆标本的历史数据相结合，建立一个遗传、表型和生态对气候变化的反应及其相互反馈的机制、层次模型。这项工作还将有助于确定生物标志物，以了解高山鸟类专家的气候耐受性。最后，该项目将通过改进预测物种分布和丰度的工具，并在考虑管理需求时纳入空间和时间的生物变化，为Rosy-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NSF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.