ABSTRACT

Understanding how natural and human-made factors affect geographic patterns of biodiversity is essential for planning conservation efforts, especially in the face of rapid global changes. Geographic patterns of biodiversity are expected to be influenced by a combination of local biological factors, like competition among species, and by regional to continental physical factors, such as climate. However, this expectation has not been evaluated from local to continental scales across diverse species lineages. In addition, natural and human-made disturbances are likely to alter this expectation. This study uses the geographic design of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) across the USA to test this idea, by quantifying multiple biological and physical factors affecting biodiversity patterns of small mammals, fish, and ground beetles at nested spatial scales. The study will add new, publicly available data to NEON including measures of animal body sizes, species diversity, and geospatial layers for disturbance and land use histories, climate, geology, and topography. Teaching modules will highlight data science skills needed to work with NEON data. Undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs will engage directly with the research. The study will also engage the public and increase awareness of the biosphere and environmental change with an interactive exhibit for Science on a Sphere developed with computer science students, a natural history museum, and a large science festival.

The proposed research will advance the field of ecology by connecting fine-grained measurements of individual organism traits, like body size, to cross-scale drivers of biodiversity from plot to continental scales. This research develops a conceptual framework that describes relationships among intraspecific trait variation (ITV) in body size, biodiversity, and drivers related to disturbance, past land use, and their interactions. This framework will advance basic theory and prediction of spatial biodiversity patterns by linking ITV to drivers of biodiversity across scales. Three main questions include: (1) How does spatial scale influence body size ITV and its relationship with biodiversity across taxa within NEON? (2) How is disturbance regime explained by different scales of climate, geodiversity and land cover, and past land use across NEON? (3) How do relationships among climate, geodiversity and land cover, past land use, disturbance regime, and body size ITV explain variation in biodiversity across taxa from local to continental scales? The proposed research will meet a major research need within NEON, to quantify disturbance and land use history data from the plot to the domain scale. Such data are essential to interpretation of observational ecological data and will be publicly disseminated as a geospatial and tabular database containing code for linking other NEON plot, site, and domain data products. These new data and biodiversity analyses will serve to establish a baseline for future spatiotemporal NEON data products that concern ecological communities and ITV.

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.

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