
NSF Org: |
DBI Division of Biological Infrastructure |
Recipient: |
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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 2016 = $5,117.00 FY 2017 = $263,831.00 FY 2018 = $173,835.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
4333 BROOKLYN AVE NE SEATTLE WA US 98195-1016 (206)543-4043 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
Seattle WA US 98195-1800 |
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): |
ADVANCES IN BIO INFORMATICS, International Research Collab |
Primary Program Source: |
01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001819DB 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
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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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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