Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Understanding the past to conserve the future: integrating historical museum collections and avian conservation genomics

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2024, Broadening Participation of Groups Underrepresented in Biology. The Fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow that will increase the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. Climate change is a major threat to biodiversity and is proceeding at an unprecedented rate.

To mitigate this biodiversity crisis conservation decisions must be based on informed predictions of species response to environmental change. This research aims to identify where birds in California are most vulnerable to climate change today and where they will likely persist under future climate regimes. Results from this study will provide a novel conservation genomic framework to identify future climate-vulnerable areas and strongholds that are resilient to change and provide the basis for conservation implementation such as reserve design, ecosystem services, sustainable livelihoods, and environmental justice in California and beyond.

The fellow will support broadening participation of diverse groups in STEM through mentorship and training, public outreach and engagement, and the development of conservation partnerships.

Accurately anticipating bird species’ response to climate change remains one of the most pressing challenges for conservation initiatives across the country. Future forecasts often lack historical information to establish a baseline for how species have responded to past environmental changes. This requires a holistic approach to understanding contemporary and historic evolutionary adaptation (genomic signals of local adaptation) and population trends (increases, decreases, range shifts, extirpations, or extinctions) in response to climate change.

The fellow will use natural history collections to compile modern and historical population and genomic data and use occupancy and demographic modeling to investigate historic changes in population sizes and the genetic and environmental factors involved in these fluctuations. The fellow will use this as a baseline to forecast species’ evolutionary potential and identify where species will persist and be most vulnerable using future climate change projections.

This research will develop a framework for incorporating collections-based research into conservation genomic studies that integrates occupancy, demographic, and predictive modeling. The fellowship will facilitate research and training at the intersection of research, conservation, and community engagement. Additionally, the fellow will support diversifying scientific participation through (1) mentoring undergraduates and starting a postdoc-graduate student mentorship program, (2) leading a skills workshop for postdocs, (3) developing educational displays for museum outreach events, and (4) building conservation partnerships to implement on-the-ground conservation action.

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.