BII: INSITE: Institute for Symbiotic Interactions, Teaching, and Education in the Face of a Changing Climate

Society is currently experiencing an era of rapidly changing climate that threatens to collapse Earth’s ecosystems. The planet is expected to warm by 2°C by 2030 and exceed a 5°C increase by 2100 without immediate global action. These new global and ecological conditions that define this era have led to steep declines in global biodiversity, threatening organisms that depend on symbiotic associations with microbes for essential benefits.

Since all plants and animals engage in a broad spectrum of interactions with microbes, it is important to assess how hosts and their microbes will respond to this rapidly shifting climate. The new Biological Integration Institute, INSITE - The INstitute for Symbiotic Interactions, Teaching, and Education in the Face of a Changing Climate - brings together a multi-disciplinary team at the University of California at Merced, Michigan State University, and Resilient Oceans to identify key threats of climate change through a symbiotic lens.

INSITE will develop tools to predict biodiversity loss and offer critical insight into how to avoid such devastation. The project employs an integrative and collaborative approach to determine how climate change will impact the ability of species to survive and adapt to future environments. Results from this integrated research will provide appropriate tools for conservation and policy advocates to construct plans to mitigate biodiversity loss across a range of potential climate futures.

In addition, INSITE will serve as a symbiosis springboard, forming a diverse group of scientists, educators, students, and community partners who respect and celebrate those individual differences that can broaden their comprehension of the world around us. INSITE scholars will leverage their science communication skills with various activities designed to reach out to local-rural communities.

The Institute will further deliver a set of portable tools and outreach resources that work to educate and train students in symbiosis and climate change across K-12, undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc levels. Finally, INSITE seeks to increase equity and diversity in STEM, where each individual’s input is equally respected by creating an atmosphere designed to recruit and retain people from diverse backgrounds (race, socioeconomic, gender, etc.) in science.

The overarching goal of INSITE is to develop a framework for understanding the resilience of microbial symbiotic systems to climate change that can be used to vertically expand symbiosis research and training in a changing world. Collaboratively, INSITE will integrate studies of three model systems under the themes of ecology, evolution, physiology, bioinformatics, applied mathematics, and conservation biology to establish a foundation of a set of expectations and a roadmap for the integrative study of symbioses under climate crises.

This integrated approach of STEM disciplines will break down interdisciplinary barriers that prevent STEM disciplines from effectively working together. Additionally, INSITE will develop a set of standards that allow for rigorous, replicative, and comparative research across other symbiotic systems. The Institute will provide the field of biology with a rich resource of ecological, genomic, molecular, modeling, and simulation data collected across varying time scales.

The proposed experiments will establish novel approaches and models that are useful for understanding not only symbiotic systems broadly, but also as “canary in a coalmine” indicators of climate change threats. Finally, a foundational goal of INSITE is to train generations of new scientists to have a holistic view on the importance of microbial interactions for conserving biodiversity.

INSITE fellows will be empowered to think integratively across disciplines and systems. The Institute’s trainees will broaden the field of symbiosis to new biological systems and scientific frontiers, making INSITE fellows more competitive for various careers.

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.