RII Track-4: Collaborative partnerships at the cusp of wildlife ecology and molecular biology

This Research Infrastructure Improvement RII Track-4 grant will examine how the migratory wildlife of Yellowstone National Park adjust their diets in response to seasonal change. Scientists need to understand how the plants that wild animals eat are able to fuel migrations in order to anticipate how the diversity of migratory wildlife and the routes that they select might change.

This is especially important for large wildlife, such as bison and pronghorn antelope, that naturally engage in long-distance migrations across both public and private lands. This project will use cutting-edge molecular technologies to forensically identify the food plants that five species of wildlife eat during the course of their seasonal migrations.

Each step of the work will enhance university teaching within Rhode Island, strengthen academic-government collaboration across multiple jurisdictions, and positively transform the career trajectory of the investigator. The proposed work establishes a new course-based undergraduate research program that enhances access and inclusion in mentored research at Brown University.

In collaboration with scientists from the National Park Service, students will develop forensic methods to characterize animal diets and report results publicly. These goals will ensure the training of a diverse workforce with the experience needed to develop and communicate about the types of rapid genetic tests that are essential in modern environmental science, healthcare, and epidemiology.

Approaches emerging in wildlife biology and molecular biology can help advance ecology across scales from individual animal behaviors to the functioning of entire ecosystems. Animal diets are known to be important across these scales because food availability influences both individual movements and the ability of many species to coexist in a world of limited resources.

However, theoretical frameworks that have developed with a focus on each of these different scales can generate conflicting predictions about how species will respond to environmental change. In this proposal, we focus on reconciling predictions about seasonality in the diets of an extensively studied assemblage of migratory large herbivores from Yellowstone National Park, which is North America’s most diverse large-herbivore community.

Our proposal combines the investigator’s expertise in dietary DNA metabarcoding with the host site’s long-term GPS-tracking and field experimental data. We will test the hypotheses that (1) seasonal dietary shifts are predictable at scales spanning individuals to food webs and (2) feedbacks in seasonal plant-herbivore interactions modulate dietary overlap and specialization across these scales.

The investigator, postdoctoral research associate, and students at Brown University will collaborate with scientists from the National Park Service to test these hypotheses. In the process, the team will generate and make publicly available a suite of biological resources that will have a long lifecycle of usefulness to research and education, including digital herbarium collections and a DNA reference library that are relevant across multiple EPSCoR jurisdictions.

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.