NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2020

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2020, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will utilize biological collections in innovative ways. In tropical forests, orchids, bromeliads, ferns, and many other species grow as epiphytes, suspended on tree branches without connection to the ground.

Because they grow high above the forest floor, epiphytes are difficult to study, so little is known about their ecology and physiology. However, they may be at great risk from climatic changes in temperature and precipitation. Many epiphyte species have long been favored by collectors and are well represented in botanical garden hothouses around the world.

This research investigates whether, instead of accessing wild plants, these living collections can be used to gather data to help us understand how epiphytes may respond to these changes and inform conservation efforts. The Fellow will also use a citizen science approach for creating a public education platform as well as involving undergraduate students of diverse backgrounds in research activities.

Functional traits are morphological, anatomical, and physiological measurements that can be used to characterize an organism’s relationship to its environment. The Fellow will collect these measurements on 300 epiphyte species housed at U.S. and international botanical gardens. These data will be used to test relationships between traits and climate variables and to compare the trait values with those of terrestrial plants.

To investigate the conservation implications of the findings, the Fellow will combine trait data with species distribution models to analyze epiphyte vulnerability to climate change. The Fellow will then develop recommendations for using living collections to gather functional trait data that will pave the way for large-scale functional trait analyses of plant species that are difficult to find or hard to measure in the wild.

In the process, the Fellow will receive valuable training in making plant physiological measurements and using species distribution modeling. Together with a group of ecologists and botanical garden staff, the Fellow will also explore the philosophical divide between cultivated plants and ecological research and make broad recommendations for their integration.

At each botanical garden the Fellow will give a public presentation geared for non-scientists about the unusual aerial lifestyle of epiphytes and how it informs their physiology, and author a similar popular press article. The Fellow will also develop methods to engage botanical garden visitors in citizen science functional trait data collection.

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.