Jeannine Cavender-Bares - US grants

This award supports the development of a world-class research and education mesocosm facility that will provide unique opportunities to: 1) conduct detailed process and simulation studies to complement ongoing field experiments; 2) improve the design of future field experiments and models; 3) examine future management and climate change scenarios; 4) educate students by integrating this facility into courses offered in at least three colleges at the University, and 5) provide a highly visible and easily accessible forum for public engagement in science education. This facility will make it possible to pursue long-term multidisciplinary studies. Two important Research and Education Themes that this unique facility will help address include: 1) Impacts of Multiple Climate Change Stressors (CO2, O3, temperature) on Northern Perennial Natural and Managed Ecosystems and 2) Effects of Seasonal Saturation and Freeze-Thaw Cycles on Natural and Managed Northern Ecosystems. The mesocosms will be developed using 12 large rhizotrons including large above ground canopies with a climate and environmental control system to examine processes ranging from those in a model ecosystem to those at a molecular scale, including above ground and subsurface processes. The mesocosm facility will be used to bridge the gap between theoretical, laboratory, field, and model-based investigations at a range of scales. A sophisticated climate control system will allow a large, interdisciplinary, collaborative research team to examine the effects of temperature, water table, carbon dioxide (CO2) and ground level ozone (O3) variations on biophysical and ecophysiological processes. In particular, the mesocosms will be uniquely designed to study cold temperature processes, which remain poorly understood and understudied. The simulation of mid-continent winter will be achieved using conditioned (filtered, modified) outside air and soil freezing. In addition, fluctuating water tables, which strongly influence the chemistry, physics, and biology of northern ecosystems, will be studied. The instrumentation will also facilitate process investigations including microbial population dynamics and root demography, soil chemistry, greenhouse gas exchange, soil water, heat, and chemical transport, physiological responses of whole plants, symbiotic associations, ecosystem dynamics and land-atmosphere energy and mass exchange. Continuous flux measurements of CO2, O3, N2O, NH3, and CH4 at each mesocosm will allow for detailed environmental control studies.

Climate change will alter key aspects of the environment for plants, such as temperature and water availability. Very little is known about how plants will contend with these changes, particularly species that are difficult to study, such as long-lived tropical trees. This project examines short-term physiological responses and the potential for long-term evolutionary changes in response to experimental manipulations of precipitation in populations of a tropical oak species that occur in different climates in Central America. The project investigates the extent to which these populations are adapted to the climate they currently experience and their potential response to climates that are similar to those predicted for the future. New insights will be gained as to whether impacts of climate change at the seedling stage enhance or constrain adaptation at later life stages of the tree. In addition, the research will identify the physiological and genetic mechanisms that enhance or limit adaptation to altered climates in this tropical tree. The project fosters the education, mentoring, and training of undergraduates, doctoral students, and a postdoctoral associate in plant ecological physiology and quantitative genetics at the University of Minnesota and at the University of Zamorano (Honduras). This work offers unique training and mentoring opportunities for Latin American undergraduates and para-taxonomists in Honduras and Costa Rica. It will also develop a collaborative, interdisciplinary network between researchers at the University of Minnesota, Cornell University, the University of Zamorano in Honduras, the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste in Costa Rica, and the Center for Ecosystem Studies (CIEco-UNAM) in Mexico.

Urban, suburban and exurban environments are important ecosystems and their extent is increasing in the U.S. The conversion of wild or managed ecosystems to urban ecosystems is resulting in ecosystem homogenization across cities, where neighborhoods in very different parts of the country have similar patterns of roads, residential lots, commercial areas and aquatic features. Funds are provided to test the hypothesis that this homogenization alters ecological structure and functions relevant to ecosystem carbon and nitrogen dynamics, with continental scale implications. The research will provide a framework for understanding the impacts of urban land use change from local to continental scales. The research encompasses datasets ranging from household surveys to regional-scale remote sensing across six metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) that cover the major climatic regions of the US (Phoenix, AZ, Miami, FL, Baltimore, MD, Boston, MA, St. Paul, MN and Los Angeles, CA) to determine how household characteristics correlate with landscaping decisions, land management practices and ecological structure and functions at local, regional and continental scales. This research will transform scientific understanding of an important and increasingly common ecosystem type (?suburbia?) and the consequences to carbon storage and nitrogen pollution at multiple scales. In addition, it will advance understanding of how humans perceive, value and manage their surroundings. The award will leverage an extensive, multi-scale program of education and outreach associated with ongoing LTER and/or ULTRA-EX projects. Activities include K-12 education and outreach to community groups, city/regional planners, natural history museums, state and local agencies and non-governmental organizations. Graduate students will participate in a Distributed Graduate Seminar in Sustainability Science (DGSS) initiated by NCEAS and the University of Minnesota Institute on Environment.

Oaks (the flowering plant genus Quercus) include some of America's most ecologically and economically important trees. The approximately 255 oaks of the New World oak lineage dominate North American and Mexican woody plant biomass, biodiversity, ecology, and nutrient cycling. Despite the significant ecosystem services provided by oaks, the biodiversity of this genus is poorly understood. In this project, collaborators from The Morton Arboretum (IL), the University of Notre Dame (IN), Duke University (NC), University of Minnesota, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México will undertake a comprehensive systematic study of the oaks of the New World. The project will integrate next-generation genomic (DNA) sequencing, plant physiology, and direct study of plants in the field and museum collections to gain insights into the oak tree of life and the basic question of how oak traits, distributions, and diversity evolve in response to changes in habitat and climate.

Understanding of how oaks respond to shifts in climate and habitat is essential to conserving forest biodiversity and healthy forest ecosystems for future generations. The project will broadly disseminate findings and increase biodiversity awareness and understanding across diverse audiences in several ways: strengthening of an international oak collaboration among U.S., Mexican, and European researchers; training of undergraduate through postdoctoral biodiversity researchers; training K-12 teachers and their students in biodiversity science; and public outreach through museums, botanical gardens, and online venues.

This project will use three biodiversity manipulations at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve to test whether plant diversity (including genotypes within species, species with different functions, and species from different evolutionary lineages) can be detected remotely at multiple spatial scales. The study will measure biodiversity from the sky and space by remotely sensing the reflected light spectra of plants and investigate the consequences of biodiversity for ecosystem and global processes. Project scientists from four institutions will investigate linkages between plant biodiversity, soil microbe diversity and ecosystem function. These efforts will serve in the development of airborne and satellite platforms that can routinely monitor biodiversity and provide critical experimental evidence for the concept of surrogacy, i.e., that one metric of biodiversity can be used to provide information about others.

The project will transform methods for detecting changes in biodiversity worldwide and will provide numerous training opportunities in science, technology and math (STEM) for young scientists. Results will be integrated into the Cedar Creek Schoolyard Ecology program and a NASA-funded STEM Education Center to train Native American reservation teachers. Citizen scientists will be engaged through the MN Phenology Network. Data and research outcomes will be archived in publically accessible data repositories.

An apparent, but untested result of changes to the urban landscape is the homogenization of cities, such that neighborhoods in very different parts of the country increasingly exhibit similar patterns in their road systems, residential lots, commercial sites, and aquatic areas; cities have now become more similar to each other than to the native ecosystems that they replaced. This research builds on the team?s prior NSF funded research on the ?ecological homogenization? of the ?American Residential Macrosystem (ARM)? and specifically investigates factors that contribute to stability and/or changes in the ARM. The aim is to determine how factors that effect change?such as shifts in human demographics, desires for biodiversity and water conservation, regulations that govern water use and quality, and dispersal of organisms?will interact with factors that contribute to stability such as social norms, property values, neighborhood and city covenants and laws, and commercial interests. The project will determine ecological implications of alternative futures of the ARM for the assembly of ecological communities, ecosystem function, and responses to environmental change and disturbance at parcel (ecosystem), landscape (city), regional (Metropolitan Statistical Area) and continental scales. Five types of residential parcels as well as embedded semi-natural interstitial ecosystems will be studied, across six U.S. cities (Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and Los Angeles). Education and outreach work will focus on K-12 teachers and students and on collaborative policy efforts with city, county, and state environmental managers.

This project investigates urbanization?s impact on the ecological homogenization of the American Residential Macrosystem (ARM) in terms of plant biodiversity, soil carbon and nitrogen cycle pools and processes, microclimate, hydrography, and land cover. This similarity of ecological characteristics is driven by complex and dynamic human actions at multiple scales?e.g., parcel, neighborhood, and region?that will shape the structure and function of the ARM over 50 to 100 year time frames, with potentially significant continental scale effects on ecological processes and environmental quality. This research addresses two core questions. First, what factors contribute to maintenance and change in the ARM? While this macrosystem is a relatively homogeneous mixture of grass lawns, shrubs, trees and impervious surfaces, there is a critical need to determine how drivers of change such as shifts in human population and ethnicity, increasing desires for biodiversity and water conservation, and regulations governing water use and quality will interact with stabilizing factors such as social norms, property values, neighborhood and city covenants and laws, and commercial interests. Researchers will test the hypothesis that that although dispersal from natural and interstitial areas, climate change, and changes in homeowner knowledge will promote ecological change; institutions, norms and values will function as counteracting, stabilizing forces on these ecological dynamics. This hypothesis will be tested by evaluating the factors that motivate change and stability at multiple scales. Results will be used to produce quantitative, data-based scenarios of future land-use patterns in the ARM. Second, what are the ecological implications of alternative futures of this macrosystem for community assembly and ecosystem function at parcel (ecosystem), landscape (city), regional (Metropolitan Statistical Area), and continental scales? The hypothesis to be tested is that management that promotes nutrient- and water-use efficient and wildlife-supporting plants as well as lower inputs of water and nutrients will give rise to greater regional biodiversity across trophic levels, higher nutrient retention, lower water use, and reduced runoff and losses of soil carbon and nitrogen from residential yards at the regional scale. Five types of residential parcels that vary in management goals and intensity and embedded semi-natural interstitial ecosystems will be studied in six U.S. cities across the U.S. (Boston, Baltimore, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Phoenix, and Los Angeles), to quantify influences on ecological dynamics. This information will be linked to land use scenarios to address the regional and continental-scale impacts of these effects. Three postdocs will be mentored as co-investigators on this project. The research program will also include interaction with municipal decision makers focused on sustainability and add a new ?Panel of Experts? feature to the YardMap citizen science program developed at Cornell University.

Biodiversity on Earth -- comprising an estimated 10 million or more different species -- provides crucial ecosystem services to the planet, including the cycling of nutrients, gases, and water, provision of food, medicine, energy, and shelter. Because biodiversity is essential to the health of the planet, it is important to understand how it is generated, maintained and lost. This topic, however, is extraordinarily complex. Biodiversity distribution patterns and ecosystem services are regulated by processes that operate across multiple hierarchical levels of organization, temporal dimensions, and spatial scales. This Research Coordination Network brings together a diverse set of researchers to integrate data and explore novel concepts that will rapidly advance the field. Researchers will explicitly investigate processes that span hierarchical levels to identify novel properties that could not have been predicted by investigating the individual parts alone. Biologists working at different scales of organization will lead the effort, in coordination with researchers with expertise in machine learning, modeling, and mathematics to ensure the required cyberinfrastructure will advance in sync with new biodiversity and ecological forecasting theory. Annual meetings and workshops will offer diverse training opportunities in biodiversity informatics and scientific communication to students and faculty. The network will establish student research immersion opportunities and extensive cross-disciplinary training through exchanges among biodiversity, environmental biology, and computer sciences laboratories at the collaborating institutions. Based on participant feedback, the Research Coordination Network will adapt best student-centric practices of collaborative research, and report them to the scientific community. Envisioned products include perspective, synthetic, proof-of-concept, and data-driven publications, and presentations at scientific meetings, webinars, and learning modules. The project also will provide outstanding education and networking opportunities to scientists at different career levels, institutions, and cultural backgrounds, contributing to the establishment of a diverse and well-trained workforce in the U.S.

The non-linearity of the complex mechanisms regulating biodiversity and ecological processes makes predictions difficult, and requires diverse data and novel analytical methods to make forecasting more accurate. This Research Coordination Network promotes convergence by bringing together a diverse set of biologists, environmental biologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians to explore the cross-scale processes regulating the Rules of Life, and the theory, models, and cyberinfrastructure needed to analyze them. This Research Coordination Network will focus on four major topics: 1) how to incorporate cross-scale processes into models of biodiversity patterns and predictions about the ecosystem functions they provide; 2) exploration and expansion of novel biodiversity monitoring approaches to better understand patterns and processes acting across scales (particularly through the use of proximal and remote sensing methods); 3) challenges and possible solutions in bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure to foster new ways to handle storage, integration, and visualization of complex biological and environmental data; and 4) novel approaches to enhance public awareness about the complexity, value, and role of biodiversity. This convergence approach promises to provide novel insights into fundamental questions about biodiversity and ecological forecasting that will have a broad impact on the biological sciences, and society more generally.

This Biology Integration Institute will use the tools of remote sensing and spectral biology to develop new techniques for measuring individual plants and landscape vegetation so as to understand the causes and consequences of biodiversity change. Biodiversity loss and climate change are major global crises that threaten humanity?s life support systems and its ability to cope with major challenges. It has never been more important for us to bring together our knowledge of life?s diversity from cells to continents to better understand the causes and consequences of its change for the biological processes that impact our well-being. As the biological sciences have become increasingly fragmented, new ways to integrate biological processes across scales are needed to understand the basis of Earth's life support systems. Spectral biology takes advantage of the way that energy interacts with matter to reveal immense amounts of information about the chemistry, structure, function, and evolution of plants. The project harnesses the technology and platforms now available, such as the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)?and those emerging even at the global scale with forthcoming satellites?to quantify building blocks of life at every biological scale using the same currency: photons from the sun that are reflected by plants. While doing so, the Institute will train the next generation of diverse and integrative biologists, including the mentoring of young scientists from marginalized groups. It will focus on engaging Native American communities, K-12 teacher training, and public outreach through Market Science modules, Minute Earth videos, a museum exhibit and public engagement and educational activities through the Bell Museum of Natural History, the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve (CCESR), and the Wisconsin Tribal Conservation Association.

The Institute will investigate the causes and consequences of plant biodiversity across scales in a rapidly changing world, from genes and molecules within cells and tissues to communities, ecosystems, landscapes and the biosphere. The Institute focuses on plant biodiversity, defined broadly to encompass the heterogeneity within life that occurs from the smallest to the largest biological scales. A premise of the Institute is that life is envisioned as occurring at different scales nested within several contrasting conceptions of biological hierarchies, defined by the separate but related fields of physiology, evolutionary biology, and ecology. The Institute will emphasize the use of spectral biology and process-oriented predictive models to investigate the ways that biological components at one scale give rise to emergent properties at higher scales by addressing five themes:
Theme 1. The genetic and environmental (i.e., GxE) drivers of trait variation at the leaf and whole plant scale linked by transcriptomic, metabolic and morphological variation;
Theme 2. How evolution generates the functional and spectral variation across the tree of life and its utility for biodiversity detection;
Theme 3. How functionally and spectrally distinct taxa, sampled across the tree of life, interact locally, leading to the assembly and dynamics of communities at multiple spatial scales, under current and future environmental conditions;
Theme 4. The consequences of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning and its response to global change;
Theme 5. How to improve parameterization of tissue- to ecosystem-scale properties at various spatial scales and advance land surface models that incorporate plant functional diversity.
The Institute will integrate biology in new ways by harnessing the potential of spectral biology, experiments, observations, and synthetic modeling in a manner never before possible to transform understanding of how variation within and among biological scales drives plant and ecosystem responses to global change over diurnal, seasonal, and millennial time scales. In doing so, the institute will use and advance state-of-the-art theory.

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.

Biodiversity?the living fabric of our planet?is rapidly changing due to alterations in the climate and human activities. These rapid changes are negatively impacting the capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services to humanity. The development of new ways to characterize and monitor biodiversity that take advantage of advancing remote sensing technologies is critical for developing effective management strategies and conservation actions to address global change. The project will evaluate the capacity of airborne and satellite remote sensing data to produce reliable predictions of plant and bird diversities across the conterminous United States. The broader impacts of this project include several components. First, the project will provide scientific and professional development of an early-stage scientist from an underrepresented group. Second, the project will contribute to the training the next generation of STEM researchers to investigate biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Third, the project scientists will engage the public in biodiversity education through the integration of project results into an undergraduate and graduate course in Biodiversity Science at the University of Minnesota. Fourth, the project will contribute to advancing international efforts to assess and monitor biodiversity globally. Finally, researchers will distribute open-source software to the world-wide research community through online repositories, fostering reproducibility.

The project combines theory and novel methods from different disciplines?including macroecology, community ecology and imaging spectroscopy?to understand the potential of remote sensing data in predicting and monitoring biodiversity. Specifically, researchers will test the hypothesis that diversity measures derived from remote sensing can be used as surrogates of other measures of biodiversity and hence for monitoring biodiversity at large spatial extents. The project addresses important gaps in our ability to predict species distributions and assemblage composition. New insights will be gained for understanding the potential of measures derived from remote sensing?such as spectral alpha and beta diversity?for the prediction of species distributions and assemblage composition. In doing so, the project will contribute to the development of novel approaches for biodiversity monitoring across time and space. Overall, the project provides a flexible framework that allows the integration of multiple means of predicting and detecting species and advances efforts to monitor changes in biodiversity.

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.

The world’s approximately 425 oak species maintain species identity even while exchanging genes with their close relatives through hybridization. This history of evolution and genetic exchange has shaped the biodiversity of northern hemisphere ecosystems. Oaks are ecologically diverse, with related species often growing in close proximity but specializing on areas of the forest landscape that differ in soil texture and moisture level or in the frequency of natural fires. Gene exchange can move such ecological specializations between oak species, broadening their ranges and ability to respond to climate change. The impacts of these genetic exchanges may extend beyond the oaks themselves. Oaks host an estimated 1000 gall wasp species worldwide and highly diverse communities of fungi associated with their roots (as mycorrhizae) and inside their leaves (as endophytes). Using paired field surveys and common garden experiments the PIs will evaluate the effects of hybridization and introgression on the genetic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity of focal oak species and their symbionts in the US and China. This work will also provide inquiry-based K-12, undergraduate, and graduate education; critical natural history training to the public through a community-science initiative in oak phenology; and publications that will bring research to public audiences.

Two interdisciplinary teams of researchers, one based in the US and one in China, will investigate how genomic, functional, and phylogenetic diversity of oak trees shape the mycorrhizal fungi, endophytic fungi, and gall wasp and other insect communities that associate with them. Research will focus on two related groups of interbreeding species: bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) and relatives in the US and bao li (Quercus serrata) and relatives in China. The project has three objectives, each conducted in parallel in China and the U.S. In Objective 1 the teams will perform range-wide phylogenomic surveys of natural populations to reconstruct genomic mosaics, characterize geographic patterns of leaf functional traits, and characterize functional and phylogenetic diversity of associated mycorrhizal fungi, leaf endophytic fungi, and gall wasps. In Objective 2 common gardens will be planted across climatic gradients to evaluate the effects of genetic variation and population differentiation on oak functional and spectral traits and relative fitness in different climates, and how these influence the phylogenetic and functional diversity of oak-associated fungal and insect communities. In Objective 3 the teams will use a second set of common garden experiments to evaluate how plant community and phylogenetic diversity affects focal oak species genetic, phylogenetic, and functional diversity. The project will provide an integrative perspective on how oak diversity within and among species impacts the broad diversity of oak-dominated ecosystems across the northern hemisphere.

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.