NSF Award
2312572
This project will measure how climate change may disrupt the species interactions that shape local adaptation. Local adaptation occurs when populations evolve to become more successful in their home environments. Harmful and beneficial interactions among species may create "biotic" patterns of local adaptation. Yet, variation in the strength of biotic adaptation across large landscapes remains poorly understood. Addressing this knowledge gap is urgent because climate change is expected to disrupt species interactions. Such shifts may challenge species' abilities to persist in changing communities. This work will generate crucial data about big sagebrush, a declining plant of restoration concern, and how its relationships with soil microbes may shift with climate change. The results of this research will be applicable to the selection of suitable seeds for restoration efforts. In addition, this project will create hands-on research and mentorship experiences for undergraduate students across disciplines. This work also aims to improve student retention in a large biology course, using active learning inspired by this imperiled native plant.<br/><br/>Local adaptation is foundational to understanding populations’ current and future persistence; however, experiments examining local adaptation rarely isolate abiotic and biotic mechanisms. This research gap is urgent, as climate change may disrupt both abiotic and biotic fitness drivers simultaneously, potentially outpacing the adaptive capacities of long-lived species. The proposed work will integrate field- and lab-based reciprocal transplant experiments, sequencing of soil bacterial and fungal communities, and modeling approaches for species-rich communities to isolate the adaptive importance of plant-microbe interactions in big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) across environmental gradients. These results will be incorporated into population models to assess whether populations from contrasting abiotic environments differ in their susceptibility to disruption of biotic adaptation under changing climatic conditions. The project team will collect additional field data to measure the population models’ predictive accuracy in quantifying the relevance of plant-microbe interactions to ongoing restoration efforts in big sagebrush. This work will advance our understanding of how the adaptive importance of biotic interactions varies across heterogenous landscapes and which abiotic drivers may shape these gradients.<br/><br/>This project is jointly funded by the Building Research Capacity of New Faculty in Biology program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).<br/><br/>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.
