| NSF Org: |
OCE Division Of Ocean Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 9, 2021 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 9, 2021 |
| Award Number: | 2126069 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Timothy Crone
tjcrone@nsf.gov (703)292-4344 OCE Division Of Ocean Sciences GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | December 1, 2021 |
| End Date: | November 30, 2024 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $223,661.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $223,661.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
55 MUSIC CONCOURSE DR SAN FRANCISCO CA US 94118-4503 (415)379-5146 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
San Francisco CA US 94118-4503 |
| 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): | OCE Postdoctoral Fellowships |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| 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): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).
Corals support some of the most diverse habitats in the world and provide people with income, food, and protection. However, corals are threatened by climate change, overfishing, and pollution. Some corals are better than others at tolerating harsher conditions. Corals also live at different depths that experience variation in temperature, light, and water flow. Understanding how corals adapt to their local habitats will help us understand how corals might survive into the future. Hybridization, where genes are exchanged among populations or species, is an important way for some organisms to adapt to changes in the environment. This process may be important for corals to successfully adapt to changing environments, as well. This research seeks to answer the question: Does hybridization help corals adapt to local environmental conditions at different reef depths? This research will help to identify the processes that are important for coral adaptation in a changing world, aiding in the conservation of vulnerable coral reef systems. The Fellow will participate in outreach events on the California Academy of Sciences museum floor, mentor high school interns, and develop curricula to help share this research with a broad audience. By training interns, scientists, and educators in climate change communication, she will amplify essential public messages about the ecological and societal impacts of climate change.
The identification of underlying adaptive mechanisms is a crucial first step towards understanding the capacity of species to adapt in a rapidly changing world. Hybridization and introgression (hybridization followed by back-crossing) may be particularly important for rapid evolution to changing environmental conditions, but investigations into their roles in adaptation to new environments has only begun. Hybridization, especially at range boundaries where species overlap, may be a rapid means of increasing standing genetic variation or introducing pre-adapted alleles into a population, with likely consequences for phenotypes, speciation, and community composition. The goal of this project is to develop a framework for predicting hybrid occurrence from environmental and ecological factors while simultaneously identifying adaptive loci and testing hybrid performance across replicated environmental gradients in a coral community. Using a suite of observational, experimental, statistical, and computational methods spanning molecular to community-levels, this research will test for 1) hybridization, 2) adaptive introgression, and 3) genome-phenome linkages in a genus of corals (Madracis spp.) in the Caribbean. This work will increase our understanding of how hybridization and adaptation interact across reef depths to influence coral health. This project also offers opportunities to engage in outreach, grow networks of science and climate change communicators, and train the next generation of STEM leaders.
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.
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 goal of this Project was to understand species boundaries, patterns of hybridization, and the potential ecological and evolutionary consequences of gene flow between different species in a genus of Caribbean corals. This Project also offered many opportunities to engage in outreach and train the next generation of STEM leaders.
For this Project, I focused on the Madracis coral genus found within long-term monitoring plots off the island of Curacao. I aimed to exhaustively sample all individual Madracis colonies within the monitoring plots during a month-long field trip in 2022. For every sampling site, the monitoring plot is ~25 x 4 meters (m) and occur at depths of 5, 10, 20, 40, and 60 m. For every plot, an imaging technology called 3D photogrammetry is used to digitize the reef plots 1-2 times a year. This methodology has allowed individual coral colonies to be followed since 2018 and colony size and health to be tracked as environmental conditions change over time.
Using SCUBA diving, I sampled 750+ Madracis colonies for genetics and morphology by collecting small tissue samples and by taking macrophotographs, respectively. The location of each colony was also identified within the 3D reef model. My samples included all six Madracis species that can reliably be found in Curacao based primarily on gross morphology: M. carmabi, M. decactis, M. formosa, M. mirabilis, M. pharensis, and M. senaria.
Over the course of this Project, I worked with the Aquatic Symbiosis Genomes Project to develop a high-quality reference genome for Madracis mirabilis. I completed low-coverage whole-genome sequencing for 672 of the colonies to assess species boundaries, identify cryptic species, and examine how common hybrids are. I also quantified morphological traits of the same colonies from macrophotographs and the physical habitat that colonies occupy from the 3D reef models. These data are being used to understand how species identity affects where a colony settles within the reef and the environmental conditions that species are best adapted to. So far, genomic and morphological analyses suggest that some of the currently recognized Madracis morphospecies might actually be composed of multiple cryptic lineages. These genetic lineages also tend to segregate by depth and other habitat characteristics, such as light exposure, suggesting that the different genetic lineages are likely adapted to different environmental conditions. Finally, I have also identified several potential hybrids, confirming previous reports of hybridization and highlighting gene flow between Madracis species that has been previously unrecognized.
Many education and mentoring opportunities were facilitated through this Project. I developed curriculum to teach high school students about coral biology, evolution, and coding using the R programming software. I used the curriculum to teach 24 Careers in Science high school interns. These interns have identities and backgrounds that are traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields. I also developed a Coral Reef Mentorship to expose some of the more advanced Careers in Science high school interns to research. I worked with four interns to categorize the position of study corals within the reef as either 'cryptic' or 'exposed'. These categories are helping to ground-truth quantitative habitat measures of the same coral colonies from 3D reef models. In addition, I mentored an undergraduate student for a summer as part of the California Academy of Sciences Summer Systematics Institute (SSI; an REU program) in Summer 2023. The SSI intern worked with coral macrophotos to quantify micromorphological features from the photos, analyzed these data, and presented her findings to the Academy community. Following the end of the SSI REU program, I continued to mentor and work with this student for one additional year. This student was also able to attend the 2023 SACNAS and the 2024 Evolution meetings to present her coral research. I also mentored a Master's student for ~1.5 years in data curation and analyses related to the 3D reef models and morphology. Finally, I participated in many outreach activities, including virtual Member Talks, tabling at donor or public events on the museum floor, classroom visits, webinars for elementary school kids around the U.S., and leading tours of the Cal Academy for college students.
Last Modified: 12/21/2024
Modified by: Jennifer Hoey
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