Award Abstract # 1349865
CAREER: Computational and visualization tools for translating climate change into ecological impacts

NSF Org: DBI
Division of Biological Infrastructure
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Initial Amendment Date: August 6, 2014
Latest Amendment Date: May 20, 2021
Award Number: 1349865
Award Instrument: Continuing Grant
Program Manager: Peter McCartney
DBI
 Division of Biological Infrastructure
BIO
 Directorate for Biological Sciences
Start Date: August 1, 2014
End Date: July 31, 2022 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $1,176,621.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $1,181,738.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2014 = $738,955.00
FY 2016 = $5,117.00

FY 2017 = $263,831.00

FY 2018 = $173,835.00
History of Investigator:
  • Lauren Buckley (Principal Investigator)
    lbuckley@uw.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of Washington
4333 BROOKLYN AVE NE
SEATTLE
WA  US  98195-1016
(206)543-4043
Sponsor Congressional District: 07
Primary Place of Performance: University of Washington
Seattle
WA  US  98195-1800
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
07
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): HD1WMN6945W6
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): ADVANCES IN BIO INFORMATICS,
International Research Collab
Primary Program Source: 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 1045, 9178, 9179
Program Element Code(s): 116500, 729800
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.074

ABSTRACT

The University of Washington is awarded a grant to develop computational and visualization tools for translating climate change into ecological impacts. The tools will answer the question: what impact will a given (for example, 3°C) climate warming have on organisms and ecological communities? They will enhance student and public understanding of the biological consequences of climate change and improve the capacity of researchers and managers to predict these biological consequences. The project will develop and disseminate an interactive web application, Mapping Environmental Stress on Animals (MESA), for visualizing the predicted body temperatures of insects and areas of thermal stress; the incidence of extreme thermal stress events; indicators of development rate, and population growth rate for our focal butterfly and grasshopper species. The core of MESA will be a biophysical model that budgets heat exchange between insects and the environment. This will address the current inaccessibility of biophysical models, which leads most analyses to approximate body temperatures as air temperatures despite numerous demonstrations that this assumption can lead to incorrect conclusions. The predictions will be visualized in a Google Earth interface along with photos and vignettes of observed climate impacts on insects such as shifts in phenology. Users will chose to explore focal grasshopper and butterfly species or choose the size, shape, and coloration of a generic ectotherm to model. MESA will offer historic and real-time estimates and predictions for future climate change scenarios. MESA will be prototyped for Colorado and subsequently extended in scope to North America. This will involve developing high spatial and temporal resolution environmental data for both current and future climates to appropriately quantify how organisms respond to both environmental means and variability. We will test MESA using historical abundance and distribution data on focal butterfly and grasshopper species.

The project will develop educational and outreach activities so that students and the public can use the web application to understand how a given amount of warming translates into thermal stress on organisms. The project will develop a variety of inquiry-based, hands-on education resources to provide high school and undergraduate students with experience visualizing and interpreting thermal stress. Project personnel will partner with local education initiatives to develop the education modules and will ultimately contribute the modules to national climate change education initiatives. The modules will follow best practices for broadening participation in science and project personnel will partner with initiatives aimed at recruiting students from underrepresented groups. Students will receive cross training in ecology and computational approaches. The project will broadly disseminate MESA?s visualizations of thermal stress to agency scientists and through public presentations. Interfacing with related initiatives such as a phenology visualization tool will leverage the project?s benefits to predicting and planning for the ecological impacts of climate change. For more information about the project visit the PI's lab website at http://faculty.washington.edu/lbuckley/. A website hosting the computational and visualization tools and educational materials will be forthcoming.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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(Showing: 1 - 10 of 28)
Buckley, Lauren B "Temperature-sensitive development shapes insect phenological responses to climate change" Current Opinion in Insect Science , 2022 , p.100897
Buckley, Lauren B and Arakaki, Andrew J and Cannistra, Anthony F and Kharouba, Heather M and Kingsolver, Joel G "Insect Development, Thermal Plasticity and Fitness Implications in Changing, Seasonal Environments" Integrative and Comparative Biology , v.57 , 2017 10.1093/icb/icx032 Citation Details
Buckley, Lauren B and Huey, Raymond B and Kingsolver, Joel G "Asymmetry of thermal sensitivity and the thermal risk of climate change" Global Ecology and Biogeography , 2022
Buckley LB and Huey RB "How extreme temperatures impact organisms and the evolution of their thermal tolerance" Integrative and Comparative Biology , 2016 10.1093/icb/icw004
Buckley LB and Huey RB "Temperature extremes: geographic patterns, recent changes, and implications for organismal vulnerabilities" Global Change Biology , 2016 10.1111/gcb.13313
Buckley LB and Kingsolver JG "Environmental variability shapes evolution, plasticity, and biogeographic responses to climate change" Global Ecology and Biogeography , 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12953
Buckley LB and Kingsolver JG. "Evolution of thermal sensitivity in variable and changing environments." Annual Review of Ecology and Evolution , 2021
Buckley LB, Arakaki AJ, Cannistra AF, Kharouba HM, and Kingsolver JG "Insect development, thermal plasticity and fitness implications in changing, seasonal environments" Integrative and Comparative Biology , v.57 , 2017 , p.988
Buckley LB, Cannistra AF, and John A "Leveraging organismal biology to forecast the effects of climate change" Integrative and Comparative Biology , 2018 doi.org/10.1093/icb/icy018
Buckley LB, Graham SI, and Nufio CR. 2021. "Grasshopper species seasonal timing underlies shifts in phenological overlap in response to climate gradients, variability, and change" Journal of Animal Ecology , v.90 , 2021 , p.1252
Buckley LB, Huey RB "Temperature extremes: geographic patterns, recent changes, and implications for organismal vulnerabilities" Global Change Biology , v.22 , 2016 , p.3829?3842
(Showing: 1 - 10 of 28)

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.

The funding enabled the creation of the TrEnCh project, which builds computational and visualization tools to Translate Environmental Change into organismal responses (trenchproject.com). The project aims to expand the application of biophysical approaches. This will improve understanding of how spatial and temporal environmental variation impacts organisms and improve predictions of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of climate change. The TrEnCh project includes the following components:

  • Translating microclimate into animal body temperatures- TrenchR is an R package for modular and accessible environmental and ecological biophysics. It offers microclimate models as well as energy budget models to translate microclimate into estimates of animal body temperature.
  • Mapping body temperatures and regions of thermal stress- We have developed several interactive visualizations (TrEnCh-map) for exploring organismal responses to environmental conditions. 
  • Providing high spatial and temporal resolution microclimate data- We have created an app for selecting and accessing high spatial and temporal resolution microclimate data.
  • Using thermal images to probe organism-environment interactions- We have developed TrEnCh-ir, a thermal image repository to aid in understanding how organisms experience their thermal environment. The repository and associated education activities aim to advance application of thermal images to understand how organisms interact with their thermal environments and resultant patterns of thermal stress.

Additional components are focused on education and outreach. TrEnCh-ed offers interactive R Shiny applications and associated tutorials to allow students and others interested to explore the ecological and evolutionary impacts of climate change through interacting with data. We have worked with high school teachers and other educators to increase the usability of the resources and to host workshops to introduce teachers to the materials. TrEnCh-ed aims to broaden participation by profiling diverse scientists who participated in data collection and targeting teacher training to diverse schools. We have also developed a series of tutorials aimed at introducing researchers, particularly trainees, to biophysical ecology. The project has also enabled our research group to improve research reproducibility, transparency, and training by adopting computational tools and best practices. We have developed an extensive How We Work repository that compiles lab best practices and policies to conduct open, reproducible, and inspiring science. The project has provided interdisciplinary training to a diverse group.

 


Last Modified: 12/02/2022
Modified by: Lauren B Buckley

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