CAREER: Harnessing herbarium specimens to investigate effects of phenological shifts on plant-insect interactions

该项目将研究气候变化如何改变植物和食草昆虫之间的相互作用。与100年前相比，由于气候变暖，今天的植物开花和长叶的时间更早。因此，许多依赖植物的生物如果不能跟上植物生长和开花的变化，就会面临危险。该项目使用新的数据源来研究气候变暖对植物及其食草昆虫的影响，食草昆虫是地球上最多样化的生物群体之一。食草昆虫在进食时会留下特征性的咬痕，这些咬痕可以揭示以植物为食的昆虫种类以及吃掉了多少植物组织。这些咬痕可以在保存的植物样本上看到。该项目将使用过去几百年的植物标本来测试植物生长和开花时间的变化如何影响以它们为食的昆虫。具体来说，该项目将测试植物生长和开花的时间提前是否导致植物和食草昆虫物种的新相互作用。了解昆虫对气候变化的反应对于更好地管理受威胁物种、农业、林业和自然生态系统的保护至关重要。数据将由本科生和研究生收集，学生将通过创建将在实验花园展出的公共艺术来了解昆虫食草动物。总之，这些努力将通过艺术科学融合，气候变化以及自然界中植物-昆虫草食动物关系的重要性来支持学生的学习和奖学金。 全球环境变化正在改变生物群落，对生物多样性产生不确定的影响。然而，描述全球变化对生物群落影响的长期数据很少，而且集中在一组狭窄的分支上，导致数据集严重有限。该项目的总体目标是利用两个关键来源的数据来确定气候变化对未充分研究的食草动物群落的近期影响：数百年来收集的植物标本和模拟过去，当前和未来气候条件的实验花园。该项目将创建一个“损害类型指南”，提供造成损害的昆虫的识别，从而促进长期数据集的收集。通过这些数据来源，该项目将评估过去100多年来气候变化导致的叶子出现时间变化所导致的新物种相互作用的潜力。实验花园将位于加州大学戴维斯分校植物园，为公众提供一个进入气候变化研究的入口。该项目还将涉及重新设计加州大学戴维斯分校的三门课程，重点是通过艺术与科学的融合和基于课程的本科生研究经验进行学习。学生将通过在K-12教室和加州大学戴维斯分校植物园的创造性参与分享他们的知识。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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 project will examine how climate change alters interactions between plants and plant-feeding insects. In contrast to 100 years ago, plants today are flowering and producing leaves earlier due to climate warming. Consequently, many organisms that rely on plants are at risk if they cannot keep pace with these changes in plant growth and flowering. The project uses new data sources to examine the effects of climate warming for plants and their insect herbivores which is one of the most diverse groups of organisms on earth. Insect herbivores leave characteristic bite marks when they feed, and these marks can reveal the species of insect that fed on a plant and how much plant tissue was eaten. These bite marks can be seen on preserved plant samples. The project will use plant collections from the past few hundred years to test how changes in the timing of growth and flowering in plants have affected the insects that feed on them. Specifically, the project will test whether earlier timing of plant growth and flowering has led to new interactions of plant and insect herbivore species. Understanding how insects respond to climate change is important for better management of threatened species, agriculture, forestry, and conservation of natural ecosystems. Data will be collected by undergraduate and graduate students, and students will learn about insect herbivores by creating public art that will be displayed at the experimental garden. Together, these efforts will support student learning and scholarship through the lenses of art-science fusion, climate change, and the importance of plant-insect herbivore relationships in nature. Global environmental change is reshuffling biotic communities with uncertain impacts on biodiversity. However, long-term data describing the effects of global change on biotic communities are rare and focus on a narrow set of clades, resulting in severely limited datasets. The overall objective of this project is to determine recent effects of climate change on understudied herbivore communities using data from two key sources: herbarium specimens collected over hundreds of years and an experimental garden mimicking past, current, and future climatic conditions. The project will create a 'damage type guide' that will provide identification of the insect causing the damage, thus facilitating collection of long-term datasets. Through these data sources, this project will assess the potential for novel species interactions resulting from changes in leaf emergence timing over the past 100+ years of climate change. The experimental garden will be located at the UC Davis Arboretum to provide an access point to the public into climate change research. The project will also involve redesigning three courses at UC Davis to focus on learning through art-science fusion and course-based undergraduate research experiences. Students will share their knowledge via creative engagement in K-12 classrooms and in the UC Davis Arboretum.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.