BII: Uncovering mechanisms of amphibian resilience to global change from molecules to landscapes

Paramount to predicting the future of biodiversity is knowing when and how living systems are resilient to (i.e., can recover from) anthropogenic disturbances. The focus of this Biology Integration Institute is on understanding resilience to a key global threat: emerging infectious diseases. The team will develop a new framework to measure resilience across multiple scales, stressors, and systems, and apply it to a case study involving a fungal disease linked to global amphibian declines.

Building on past research in four complementary systems, the team will address four questions: (1) How does the history of disturbance differ across systems? (2) How have changes at different levels of biological organization shaped overall system responses? (3) What are the mechanisms contributing to resilience and are they shared across systems? (4) How is resilience modulated by multiple interacting stressors? The framework and findings will be applicable to hundreds of amphibian species facing disease-related stressors and, more broadly, for understanding the resilience of biological systems to myriad global change threats.

The Institute’s training activities will reach and connect high school through postdoctoral scholars using authentic biology research experiences that foster cross-disciplinary understanding, serve large numbers of students with a focus on underrepresented groups, and promote persistence in STEM. Outreach activities will reach students, teachers, members of the public, and wildlife managers with messages about biodiversity, resilience, and global change.

Together, the institute’s activities will showcase the power of an integrative, team science approach for addressing some of the biggest and most challenging questions in biology.

The focus of this Biology Integration Institute (BII) is on understanding resilience in the context of global change. Resilience, or the ability to recover after a perturbation, is an emergent property of living systems. Progress toward a mechanistic understanding has been stymied by the lack of a common currency and framework that is applicable across scales, among systems, and in response to different stressors.

The team’s activities will address these knowledge gaps by developing a flexible resilience framework and applying it to a detailed case study involving a key global change threat to biodiversity: emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). Leveraging past research, the team aims to uncover mechanisms of resilience to chytridiomycosis, an EID of amphibians caused by a fungal pathogen, in four complementary systems by answering four key questions: (1) How does the history of disturbance differ across systems? (2) How have changes at different levels of biological organization shaped overall system responses? (3) What are the mechanisms contributing to resilience and are they shared across systems? (4) How is resilience modulated by multiple interacting stressors?

The Institute’s training and outreach programs will feed back into the research. Training activities will reach and connect high school through postdoctoral scholars from across the country through authentic biology research experiences that foster cross-disciplinary understanding, serve large numbers of students with a focus on underrepresented groups, and promote persistence in STEM.

Outreach activities will reach students and teachers, members of the public, and wildlife managers with messages about global change and resilience.

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.