Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: The influence of adaptation to fine-scale topographic variation on climate-induced range shifts

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2024, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment, and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. This project will investigate how an alpine plant from the Rocky Mountains will respond and adapt to climate change.

In the alpine, climate change causes earlier snowmelt that makes the alpine growing season longer, drier, and stressful for alpine plants. To respond to these changes, plants may either move to areas with more favorable conditions or stay put and adapt to the new climate. This project investigates how native alpine plants respond to earlier snowmelt and uses spatial models to predict how the species might move its range or adapt to climate change in the future.

Alpine systems are very vulnerable to climate change because they are confined to mountaintops, and this research improves understanding of how these systems will change and how they can be protected in the future. The fellow will also contribute to society by mentoring community college students and doing community outreach for elementary schools.

Species distribution patterns are governed at multiple scales, from local habitat preferences to global geographic range limits. However, we have limited understanding of how population responses to microclimate variation impacts if and how fast range shifts can occur. Addressing this challenge requires an integrated understanding of genomic, phenotypic, and environmental variation within and among populations that span a species’ range.

This project will use a widespread alpine plant (Androsace septentrionalis) as a model system to evaluate the genetic and environmental drivers of range shifts in response to climate variation at multiple spatial scales. The fellow will use field and greenhouse experiments, genetic analyses, and modeling to understand how population responses to microclimate mediate range expansions under multiple climate change scenarios.

These complementary approaches will provide new information about how ecological, demographic, and evolutionary processes at multiple scales collectively influence the dynamics of species ranges. This fellowship will train the fellow in experimental, genomic, and modeling approaches in preparation for an academic research career. The fellow will contribute to broadening participation in STEM by providing mentored research positions for community college students and developing lessons on alpine plants and ecosystems for elementary school students from underserved communities.

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.