Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: Effects of precipitation variation on species interactions and coexistence

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. The research focuses on improving understanding of plant species interactions and coexistence under different environmental contexts, a critical need in the context of increasing global change.

Rainfall patterns, including frequency and intensity, are shifting with climate change which can negatively affect plant communities, including driving losses in species abundance and diversity. Although prior research assessed plant response to changes in precipitation averages, it remains unclear how changes in precipitation frequency and intensity can affect plant performance.

Using four annual plant species from a threatened California serpentine ecosystem, this research will inform how interactions among plants, such as competition, change under different environmental contexts and scale up to affect coexistence. Further, the research will help inform local conservation of the focal plant community and a federally threatened butterfly subspecies that is dependent on multiple focal plant species.

Undergraduate and graduate students at the Fellow’s host institutions will benefit from this research through the development of teaching modules and undergraduate mentorship.

For their research, the Fellow will quantify plant performance, species interactions, and coexistence in a greenhouse setting. They will ask Q1) how do three precipitation regimes that differ in amount, frequency, and intensity affect survival, growth, and reproduction across species that vary in functional traits? Then, by planting focal species alone or with different background densities of conspecific or heterospecific neighbors, they will ask Q2) how environmentally-dependent species interactions mediate plant performance.

Finally, they will ask Q3) how expectations of species coexistence versus competitive exclusion differ across precipitation regimes. This research will promote the training goals of the Fellow, including 1) further developing quantitative and analysis skills, such as Bayesian analyses, 2) managing greenhouse experiments and working with annual plants, and 3) training in pedagogy and mentorship.

The Fellow will promote postdoc success, diversity, and community by organizing professional and social events, such as postdoc writing groups and by inviting postdoctoral researchers from diverse backgrounds as departmental seminar speakers.

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.