Collaborative Research: ORCC: LIVING WITH EXTREMES - PREDICTING ECOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY RESPONSES TO CLIMATE CHANGE IN A HIGH-ALTITUDE ALPINE SONGBIRD

The ability of wildlife to cope with climate change depends on the capacity to do one or more of three things: move to suitable areas, adapt through evolution, or adjust behavior and physiology. Climate change can force mountaintop wildlife onto an “escalator to extinction” as temperatures rise, because no higher-elevation options exist. This project examines how two related mountaintop songbirds, the Brown-capped Rosy-Finch and the Sierra Nevada Gray-Crowned Rosy-Finch, have combined these strategies to specialize and persist in extreme alpine environments over time.

It uses museum specimens to establish a pre-climate change baseline and field surveys to explore how current coping strategies vary across the high-elevation range of each songbird. The project integrates these findings with climate change projections to forecast future responses through an integrated statistical model incorporating movement, evolutionary, and behavior changes such as shifts in annual timing of parenting and diet.

Absence of basic information about Rosy-Finches (RF) currently hinders management by state and federal agencies. The project will deliver tailored reports and data products to partner agencies in the western United States to enable uptake of findings and model approaches into decision-making. The project will also provide summer field research internships to four undergraduate students each year through the UCSC Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program and Center to Advance Mentored, Inquiry-based Opportunities (CAMINO), which serve students from marginalized backgrounds in STEM, and train a graduate student and two postdoctoral fellows as scientists and effective mentors for diverse students.

While reports of extirpations and range contractions in high-altitude species are increasingly widespread, less attention has been paid to the potential roles of gene flow and local adaptation in extinction avoidance, and of behavioral responses that could both allow individuals to cope and influence their eco-evolutionary responsiveness. Correspondingly, while the methodology for determining the capacity for range shifts through species distribution modeling has developed steadily over the last several decades, the ability to incorporate the capacity for adaptation, plasticity, and distributional shifts into a unified framework for forecasting species responses to environmental change remains limited.

The integration of statistical, genomic, and ecological approaches across two Rosy-Finch subspecies will address fundamental eco-evolutionary questions: How does natural selection operate across space and time to constrain species distributions? What are the roles of ecological and evolutionary constraints on climate change response in extreme-environment specialists?

The project will integrate spatial data with historical data from museum specimens to build a mechanistic, hierarchical model of genetic, phenotypic, and ecological responses to climate change and feedbacks among them. The work will also help identify biomarkers for understanding climate tolerance across high-alpine bird specialists. Finally, the project will inform Rosy-Finch as well as broader wildlife management under climate change by refining tools to forecast species distributions and abundances and including spatial and temporal organismal variation in considering management needs.

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.