
NSF Org: |
DEB Division Of Environmental Biology |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | August 25, 2011 |
Latest Amendment Date: | March 16, 2015 |
Award Number: | 1136717 |
Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
Program Manager: |
George Gilchrist
DEB Division Of Environmental Biology BIO Directorate for Biological Sciences |
Start Date: | January 1, 2012 |
End Date: | December 31, 2015 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $523,916.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $563,916.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2014 = $20,000.00 FY 2015 = $20,000.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2601 WOLF VILLAGE WAY RALEIGH NC US 27695-0001 (919)515-2444 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
122 Dan Allen Raleigh NC US 27695-7617 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): | Dimensions of Biodiversity |
Primary Program Source: |
01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.074 |
ABSTRACT
Earth's climate is rapidly changing and biodiversity is changing with it: species evolve or disappear locally, regionally, or globally. This research focuses on whether populations and species of forest ants are able to adapt to climate change and avoid local extinction. Forest ants process soil, cycle nutrients, disperse seeds of many understory plants, and respond rapidly to changes in air temperature. Samples of common ant species will be collected from forests throughout the eastern U.S. DNA sequencing and phylogenetics will be used to reconstruct their evolutionary history and to reveal particular genes that may have evolved in response to climate change. Genes will also be sequenced from ants collected from experimental sites in Massachusetts and North Carolina that have been continuously warmed for three years. In controlled laboratory experiments, ants will be exposed to a range of high temperatures predicted by climate change models, and the physiological and biochemical responses of ants will be analyzed, which can provide clues as to the adaptability of ants to increasing temperatures.
The results of this research will help to understand how various physiological and biochemical traits are likely to respond to climate change, potentially enabling key species to avoid extinction. Additionally, this research program will train undergraduates and graduate students and will provide public outreach and education on the effects of climate change on biodiversity. Summer high school outreach programs for both teachers and students will be enhanced, and citizen-scientists will be engaged in documenting the effects of climate change on biodiversity.
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Most animal species are insects. Similarly, most individual animals are insects. As a result, it is perhaps not surprising that as climate changes many of the most extreme consequences for human health and well-being, agriculture and more generally civilization will be due to shifts in the processes carried out by insects, be they bad for humans (vectoring the pathogens that cause disease) or good for humans (pollinating crops). However, our understanding of how insects will respond to climate change is limited. It is limited in no small part because insects are so astonishingly diverse that most species have yet to be named much less studied in sufficient detail to understand how they will respond to the changes in climate predicted to occur in the next decades. One resolution to this problem is to study every species, to massively increase the amount we spend on understanding life. We have proven ourselves unable or unwilling to carry out such an effort. Another approach, the one we take here, is to focus on a relatively well studied group of organisms--in our case ants--and in doing so to understand the general features of their response to climate change that might also be likely to hold for other organisms. Here, in essence, we treat ants as model organisms for understanding the consequences of climate change.
We considered the ways in which ants have responded both to experimental warming, in the largest forest warming experiment yet conducted, urban warming (due to the heat island effect) and the change in climate that has already occurred in some regions over the last fifty years. In addition, we have used the tools of evolutionary biology to understand how ants have likely responded to changes in climate in the past million and millions of years. In addition, we have then considered in more details the specific genes that appear to allow (or fail to allow some ant species to better respond to warming). We have also considered the ways in which the microbes the ants depend on may have shifted in response to warming. Finally, we considered whether the response of ants (in terms of the distributions, behaviors, gene expression, and microbes) to warming change what the ants in any particular region might do under warmer conditions. Do they still disperse seeds? Do they control or fail to control pest species? Are they likely to be more or less of a problem as pests of humans themselves?
Our results with ants have shown us that one simple metric of the biology of an ant species is very predictive of how it will respond to warming conditions, the thermal extremes it can tolerate. Particularly when combined with knowledge of where an ant lives (e.g., in the canopy or on the ground), a simple measure of the temperature extremes an ant can live under tell us a great deal about how it will respond to experimental warming in the forest, how it is likely to have responded to warming (or cooling) in the past, and how it is likely to have responded to urban warming. Because this attribute of ant biology tends to be similar for related species, it allows us to make rather general predictions about which ants will succeed in the future in different regions even if we don't know very much about the biology of some ants. This work has facilitated the first steps in application. We are now considering how the species that eat our crops or pollinate them will change with warming and how farmers might mitigate the negative effects of these changes. The results from our work on ants make this far easier than it might otherwise have been, particularly given that most of the species that eat crops or pollinate crops are far more poorly understood than are ants (this sounds implausible and yet is true), such that general approaches like ours are necessary.
Finally, in doing this work we have been able to involve researchers from 16 other institutio...
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