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CAREER: Harnessing herbarium specimens to investigate effects of phenological shifts on plant-insect interactions
| Funder | National Science Foundation (US) |
|---|---|
| Recipient Organization | University of California-Davis |
| Country | United States |
| Start Date | Sep 01, 2023 |
| End Date | Aug 31, 2028 |
| Duration | 1,826 days |
| Number of Grantees | 1 |
| Roles | Principal Investigator |
| Data Source | National Science Foundation (US) |
| Grant ID | 2238310 |
Grant Description
The project will examine how climate change alters interactions between plants and plant-feeding insects. In contrast to 100-years ago, plants today are flowering and producing leaves earlier due to climate warming. Consequently, many organisms that rely on plants are at risk if they cannot keep pace with these changes in plant growth and flowering.
The project uses new data sources to examine the effects of climate warming for plants and their insect herbivores which is one of the most diverse groups of organisms on earth. Insect herbivores leave characteristic bite marks when they feed, and these marks can reveal the species of insect that fed on a plant and how much plant tissue was eaten. These bite marks can be seen on preserved plant samples.
The project will use plant collections from the past few hundred years to test how changes in the timing of growth and flowering in plants have affected the insects that feed on them. Specifically, the project will test whether earlier timing of plant growth and flowering has led to new interactions of plant and insect herbivore species. Understanding how insects respond to climate change is important for better management of threatened species, agriculture, forestry, and conservation of natural ecosystems.
Data will be collected by undergraduate and graduate students, and students will learn about insect herbivores by creating public art that will be displayed at the experimental garden. Together, these efforts will support student learning and scholarship through the lenses of art-science fusion, climate change, and the importance of plant-insect herbivore relationships in nature.
Global environmental change is reshuffling biotic communities with uncertain impacts on biodiversity. However, long-term data describing the effects of global change on biotic communities are rare and focus on a narrow set of clades, resulting in severely limited datasets. The overall objective of this project is to determine recent effects of climate change on understudied herbivore communities using data from two key
Sources & References
herbarium specimens collected over hundreds of years and an experimental garden mimicking past, current, and future climatic conditions. The project will create a 'damage type guide' that will provide identification of the insect causing the damage, thus facilitating collection of long-term datasets. Through these data sources, this project will assess the potential for novel species interactions resulting from changes in leaf emergence timing over the past 100+ years of climate change. The experimental garden will be located at the UC Davis Arboretum to provide an access point to the public into climate change research. The project will also involve redesigning three courses at UC Davis to focus on learning through art-science fusion and course-based undergraduate research experiences. Students will share their knowledge via creative engagement in K-12 classrooms and in the UC Davis Arboretum. 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.
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University of California-Davis
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