NSF Award
2126069
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).<br/><br/>Corals support some of the most diverse habitats in the world and provide people with income, food, and protection. However, corals are threatened by climate change, overfishing, and pollution. Some corals are better than others at tolerating harsher conditions. Corals also live at different depths that experience variation in temperature, light, and water flow. Understanding how corals adapt to their local habitats will help us understand how corals might survive into the future. Hybridization, where genes are exchanged among populations or species, is an important way for some organisms to adapt to changes in the environment. This process may be important for corals to successfully adapt to changing environments, as well. This research seeks to answer the question: Does hybridization help corals adapt to local environmental conditions at different reef depths? This research will help to identify the processes that are important for coral adaptation in a changing world, aiding in the conservation of vulnerable coral reef systems. The Fellow will participate in outreach events on the California Academy of Sciences museum floor, mentor high school interns, and develop curricula to help share this research with a broad audience. By training interns, scientists, and educators in climate change communication, she will amplify essential public messages about the ecological and societal impacts of climate change. <br/><br/>The identification of underlying adaptive mechanisms is a crucial first step towards understanding the capacity of species to adapt in a rapidly changing world. Hybridization and introgression (hybridization followed by back-crossing) may be particularly important for rapid evolution to changing environmental conditions, but investigations into their roles in adaptation to new environments has only begun. Hybridization, especially at range boundaries where species overlap, may be a rapid means of increasing standing genetic variation or introducing pre-adapted alleles into a population, with likely consequences for phenotypes, speciation, and community composition. The goal of this project is to develop a framework for predicting hybrid occurrence from environmental and ecological factors while simultaneously identifying adaptive loci and testing hybrid performance across replicated environmental gradients in a coral community. Using a suite of observational, experimental, statistical, and computational methods spanning molecular to community-levels, this research will test for 1) hybridization, 2) adaptive introgression, and 3) genome-phenome linkages in a genus of corals (Madracis spp.) in the Caribbean. This work will increase our understanding of how hybridization and adaptation interact across reef depths to influence coral health. This project also offers opportunities to engage in outreach, grow networks of science and climate change communicators, and train the next generation of STEM leaders.<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.
