NSF Award
2120468
This project focuses on collecting and describing mammals and their tapeworm and flea parasites from the grasslands of Central Asia. These parasites are highly diverse and ecologically important groups, and many are sensitive indicators of ecosystem quality; further, the parasitic infections they cause can have major negative impacts on wildlife. They also can play an important role in transmitting diseases from wild to domesticated species, and also to humans. However, knowledge of the diversity of parasite species, their geographic distributions, and the precise hosts they occur on and in remains highly fragmentary for much of the world. Central Asian mammals and their associated parasites are particularly highly imperiled but also little studied. This project will collect new material and study how tapeworm and flea parasites from the region evolve in conjunction with their mammalian hosts; it will also consider how the hosts and parasites have responded to various ecological changes across the region. This work is extremely time-sensitive, with many Central Asian ecosystems on the cusp of major land use change as economies shift and major construction occurs in the region. Numerous specimens will be collected, and these will serve as a repository of parasite diversity useful for assessing how future global change influences the distribution of parasites and their hosts. This may ultimately improve public health outcomes. The work will also involve training the next generation of early-career STEM researchers for careers in biodiversity science. <br/><br/>The STEPP-NET project will rapidly advance discovery and description of species diversity, host associations, and community assembly, in two mammal-associated macroparasite clades - fleas and cestodes - across the vast grasslands of Central Asia. This region is a prototype for exploring host-parasite dynamics and spillover in response to human activity; historically, as a conduit for ancient Silk Road trade routes, and, currently, from intensifying land use changes and construction. STEPP-NET leverages existing museum specimens, new expeditionary collections in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, and genomic analyses of hosts and parasites to advance knowledge of species boundaries, environmental and host niche breadth, and the exploration of novel host interfaces by focal parasite clades in response to global change pressures. A key outcome of STEPP-NET will be an extended specimen network for Central Asia, in which mammal and parasite specimens are durably linked to derived data and immediately useful in global biodiversity studies and public health initiatives. The project also creates opportunities for STEM graduate and undergraduate students to participate across the spectrum of modern biodiversity science, from international fieldwork to specimen curation and digitization, genomics, and integrative taxonomy. It will build out this community of early-career STEM researchers even further by developing undergraduate and graduate educational modules that are implemented across our institutions and hosted online for broader biodiversity literacy.<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.
