NSF Org:	EF Emerging Frontiers
Recipient:	THE RESEARCH FOUNDATION FOR THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
Initial Amendment Date:	August 3, 2022
Latest Amendment Date:	August 3, 2022
Award Number:	2221988
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Justin Lawrence jlawrenc@nsf.gov  (703)292-2425 EF  Emerging Frontiers BIO  Directorate for Biological Sciences
Start Date:	February 1, 2023
End Date:	January 31, 2027 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount:	$2,945,234.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date:	$2,945,234.00
Funds Obligated to Date:	FY 2022 = $2,945,234.00
History of Investigator:	Charlotte Lindqvist (Principal Investigator) cl243@buffalo.edu Jason Briner (Co-Principal Investigator) Elizabeth Thomas (Co-Principal Investigator) Corey Krabbenhoft (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office:	SUNY at Buffalo 520 LEE ENTRANCE STE 211 AMHERST NY  US  14228-2577 (716)645-2634
Sponsor Congressional District:	26
Primary Place of Performance:	SUNY at Buffalo 520 Lee Entrance Buffalo NY  US  14228-2567
Primary Place of Performance Congressional District:	26
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI):	LMCJKRFW5R81
Parent UEI:	GMZUKXFDJMA9
NSF Program(s):	URoL-Understanding the Rules o
Primary Program Source:	01002223DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s):	068Z
Program Element Code(s):	106Y00
Award Agency Code:	4900
Fund Agency Code:	4900
Assistance Listing Number(s):	47.074

ABSTRACT

Over the last century, global climate has experienced marked temperature increases that have incurred environmental, biotic, and societal impacts. Research on organismal responses to climate change have often concentrated on single or closely-interrelated species, and over short to very recent timescales. The long-term effects from the amplitude and duration of climate-change remain largely unknown because species are embedded in complex networks of interactions with one another and the environments they live in, and because there is substantial variation in responses among species over space and time. While the Earth?s global temperatures have fluctuated repeatedly over its entire history, the abrupt changes that took place just after the last Ice Age are particularly useful analogs for processes occurring today. This research will focus on prehistoric climate perturbations in Southeast Alaska, an ideal natural laboratory that holds exceptional geologic archives of past biological and climate change. The region is a hotspot of biological diversity that hosted remarkable shifts of native species over the past ~40 thousand years and served as a crucial gateway for early human migration into the New World. The assembled team of scholars, with cross-disciplinary expertise across the biological and geological sciences, will examine how Southeast Alaskan ecosystems responded to Ice-Age environmental change. This research will provide important insights into how rapid climatic shifts can serve as triggers for dramatic and irreversible downstream impacts on both native and colonizing species. The project will invest in interdisciplinary STEM training and career-building to educate the next generation of multidisciplinary scientists, including training of postdocs and a cohort of graduate and undergraduate students spanning different disciplines. It will also offer interdisciplinary seminars, a 1-credit course, summer continuing education programs for science teachers in Buffalo City high schools, and an outreach program targeting K-12 students in Southeast Alaska.

Global warming is occurring at an unprecedented rapid pace in the history of Earth, and its effects are predicted to include loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise, changes in weather patterns, shifts in geographic ranges for plants, animals and pathogens, lengthening of growing seasons and flowering times, and extinction risks. This project will integrate paleoecological and paleoclimatic information with genetic data to uncover ecosystem changes across a region that evolved through a backdrop of considerable temperature, ice sheet, and sea level transitions. Employing a convergent research approach that combines expertise in paleogenomics, ecology, geology and paleoclimatology, the project will focus on the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition and three Holocene rapid warming events in Southeast Alaska, which will serve as a model system for a new and general paradigm. Invoking the ecological concept of ?alternative stable states? over evolutionary time, the research will test the hypothesis that in response to past climate change, ecosystems underwent regime shifts characterized by alternative stable states, environmental tipping points, and periods of rapid community turnover. This research will fill important spatial and temporal gaps in high-resolution, terrestrial climate records spanning a period of dramatic climate change and define universal principles and emergent properties that underlie ecosystem shifts in response to rapid environmental transformation, including a better understanding of how environmental variation impacts ecosystem resilience. The project will invest in interdisciplinary STEM training and career-building to educate the next generation of multidisciplinary scientists, including training of postdocs and a cohort of graduate and undergraduate students spanning different disciplines. It will also offer interdisciplinary seminars, a 1-credit course, summer continuing education programs for science teachers in Buffalo City high schools, and an outreach program targeting K-12 students in Southeast Alaska.

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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