Postdoctoral Fellowship: CREST-PRP: Soil Arthropods as Biosensors of Environmental in Caribbean Terrestrial Coastal Ecosystems

The CREST Postdoctoral Research Program (CREST-PRP) provides two years of support for research, training, and mentoring experiences for individual early career scientists at active CREST Centers. The goal of the CREST-PRP is to increase the STEM workforce presence of individuals who are members of groups underrepresented in STEM fields. CREST-PRP awards recognize investigators with significant potential and support their research experiences to broaden their perspectives, facilitate interdisciplinary interactions, and prepare CREST-PRP scholars for positions of leadership within the scientific community.

The research project “CREST-PRP: Soil Arthropods as Biosensors of Environmental in Caribbean Terrestrial Coastal Ecosystems”, will examine how climate change, combined with both historical and ongoing human activities, affect Caribbean coastal ecosystems. The study will focus on soil arthropods, such as insects, spiders, centipedes, and certain crustaceans, which are crucial for several ecological functions, like assisting in forming soil, regulating water within ecosystems, and cycling nutrients, and serve as biosensors to rapidly indicate environmental changes.

By studying arthropods and their responses to different environmental conditions in two distinct ecosystems within Puerto Rico's Northeastern Ecological Corridor Reserve, this study aims to understand the complex interactions between climate change, historical land use, and biodiversity, contributing to the broader understanding of how environmental changes affect soil biodiversity. The outcomes will provide information important to ecosystem management and restoration practices and policies at local, regional, and global levels aiming to foster the long-term preservation and health of our ecosystems.

Addressing the impacts that climate change have on critical ecosystems requires an integrated approach, especially in regions like the Caribbean, known for their significant biodiversity. Research and management approaches must consider the baseline of climatic stressors, integrating both historical and current human-induced factors within a spatiotemporal framework.

This study will utilize soil arthropods' biodiversity and function as biosensors to assess the cumulative effects of climate variability, land use, and substrate biophysiochemical conditions within representative historically modified Caribbean coastal ecosystems. Organisms’ reactions to changes in their environment yield essential information for assessing the health and functionality of ecosystems.

Our study will investigate two distinct ecosystems within the Northeastern Ecological Corridor Reserve in Puerto Rico, a dry forest on volcanic substrate and a humid forest on sandy substrate, and will address two primary research questions: 1) How does historical land use and plant cover influence current soil organic matter?, 2) What is the impact of weather variability, substrate physico-chemistry, and plant litter cover on the abundance and richness of soil arthropod functional groups? Five sampling plots will be established in a thirty square meter area for each ecosystem, measuring substrate physico-chemistry and collecting soil samples during various weather periods.

These samples, divided into loose litter, old litter, and humus, will be processed using lighted Tulgren-Berlese extractors. A soil arthropods photographic dataset produced as part of this work will be available to assist in identifying species using computer vision and deep learning, for use in scientific research, community outreach education, and training programs.

This comprehensive approach is designed to yield essential insights that will inform the development of adaptive management strategies, lay the groundwork for community involvement, and contribute to the sustainable conservation of these crucial ecosystems.

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.