NSF Award
2325838
Title: Collaborative Research: BoCP-Implementation: Integrating Traits, Phylogenies and Distributional Data to Forecast Risks and Resilience of North American Plants<br/><br/>Approximately 38,000 species of seed plants in North America are assembled into an array of communities that reflect diversity in geology and climate, and which have dynamic evolutionary histories. These species represent approximately 22% of the world’s seed plant flora and an enormous range of ecologies and traits. Despite considerable effort, we lack an understanding of why some lineages and regions seem to be more resilient than others in response to accelerating climate and land use changes. With this study, we will conduct a continent-wide examination of the diversity of seed plants, along with their patterns of distribution - past, present, and future. The resulting information will be essential for predicting and modeling the resilience of lineages and communities in the face of rapid global change. Central to this research will be an examination of plant traits and their evolutionary histories, which together will provide new means to assess what has shaped communities and to identify which lineages are likely to be winners or losers on our changing planet. This work will also provide resources for the plant biology community and will help build capacity through a strong focus on training, connecting to conservation outcomes, and a focused effort to link to traditional ecological knowledge. Furthermore, a major component of the project is to increase capacity in biodiversity science, community resource development, translation of fundamental science to conservation policy across North America, and broadening participation in science. The project will also include resource development, training, and engagement for high schoolers, instructors, undergraduates, and the broader research community.<br/><br/>Plant diversity in North America has been shaped by forces operating over millennia, and eco-evolutionary dynamics determining the present and future state of the flora can only be understood in this larger context. Our scientific goals are threefold, all relating to the development of a framework for integrating key facets of biodiversity dynamics, and to use those as a means to predict future response of North American plants to environmental change. First, we will assemble a detailed view of historical and current trait diversity, as well as endemism across the continent. These measures will allow us to test potential mechanisms, operating over longer time scales, that have led to diverse continent-wide distributional patterns of lineages and traits; they can be further linked to climatic stability as an interacting driver of diversity Second, we will examine distributional trends over the last 75 years for a well-sampled subset of species that comprehensively cover the traits of North American plants in order to test trait-distribution relationships and to discover which traits are linked to resilience in the face of stressors such as changes in climate and land use. Finally, we will link the first two aims together to forecast changes in plant diversity, and we will use these forecasts to inform data-driven decisions regarding conservation prioritization of both lineages and geographic regions. These key insights for the flora of North America will also aid in understanding the eco-evolutionary processes underlying the many animal and fungal communities that depend on these plant communities. The large scope and scale of this project creates the potential to address some of the most important and pressing questions regarding the flora of North America.<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.
