Collaborative Research: Integrated distribution models for North American mammals as tests of niche conservatism.

Mapping animal populations is a powerful approach for learning what factors are important to the species. By comparing records of where animals are common, rare, or absent with local environmental conditions researchers can quantify the relative effects of habitat, climate, and human disturbances. The proliferation of new animal data from camera traps and citizen

scientists allows these questions to be asked at larger scales, but this also introduces a new problem of local specialization - do bears in Florida respond to the environment in the same ways as bears in Maine? Can we have one model that predicts a species abundance across its range? This project will address this question by evaluating to what extent different populations

are consistent in their response to environmental factors across the country. The resulting maps will show where mammal species are more or less common, which will be useful for conservation and wildlife management. Furthermore, the results will also highlight which local or national environmental factors are driving these patterns, which could be useful when

mitigating climate change, designating habitat corridors, or planning other active population management techniques. Comparing these results across 100 North American species will show the broader importance of local ecological specialization in mammal evolution. In addition to publications, the results will be shared through the Wild Animals podcast and YouTube

channel, including the best camera trap footage. This project asks to what extent the ecological niche reflects range-wide tendencies of a species (i.e. phylogenetic conservatism) vs. local adaptation by a population. This is a critical question not only for understanding evolution, but also when considering how to manage populations

facing climate change and anthropogenic disturbances. The project will test the hypothesis that ecological similarity should parallel phylogenetic similarity and also compare the degree of local adaptation to natural (climate and vegetation) vs. anthropogenic factors. To meet these objectives, researchers will create continental scale species distribution models for

approximately 100 North American mammal species using data integration techniques that combine traditional museum data with ‘born digital’ data from camera traps and citizen science. These new data include camera trap surveys at NEON sites and from the Snapshot USA program which runs annually in all 50 states. The Snapshot program surveys 1500 sites/yr

through a massive collaboration between 150+ scientists, including many undergraduate classes (>800 students from 40 institutions) and underserved communities. The project will grow this network by recruiting more participants, providing timely results that they can use with their students with prepared classroom modules, offering online data analysis workshops for

participants, and making the data publicly available each year. This hierarchical, integrated, spatially-varying model approach will allow researchers to address new questions about the scale of ecological adaptation and whether natural factors still regulate most species or if evolutionary responses to anthropogenic changes are outpacing these natural processes.

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.