Postdoctoral Fellowship: PRFB: The tropical "escalator to extinction"; linking community pattern to mechanistic process

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 focuses on the ‘escalator to extinction’ – the process of montane specialist species shifting their distributions to higher elevations in response to warming climates, resulting in mountain top extinctions.

Specifically, this project uses a combination of analytical work of long term data, and field experiments to establish both the mechanistic drivers of the ‘escalator’, and the degree to which the ‘escalator’ applies across a whole biological community. Tropical mountains are the most biodiverse environments on earth, despite representing only a fraction of its land area.

Understanding the impacts of changing climates on montane biodiversity hotspots is thus critical to provide both accurate projections of climate impacts on biodiversity, and to mitigate them through effective management at local and global scales. Results from this project will offer significant insight into our understanding of the mechanisms that drive community shifts in tropical montane biota, paving the way to more accurate biological forecasts.

The fellow will share stories of montane biodiversity to non-academic audiences through media outlets and share results of this project with in-country government and non-governmental agencies directly responsible for the long-term management of the region.

The fellow will investigate the mechanisms and taxonomic spread of the ‘escalator to extinction’ via a two-pronged approach in a long-term field site in the Sierra del Merendón, Honduras. Firstly, this project will establish the extent of abundance and range shifts for hundreds of species across diverse taxonomic groups that live along a lowlands-to-mountaintop elevational gradient in these mountains.

This will be accomplished by analyzing a multi-decadal, repeated-effort multi-taxon monitoring dataset. Secondly, in the field, this project will test the mechanisms that underlie the observed shifts (or lack thereof) in selected taxa. Specifically, this aspect of the project will test the three major hypotheses for how climate maintains species’ elevational ranges: directly via physiology, indirectly via habitat specialisms, or indirectly via the outcome of species interactions.

Collectively, this will identify and link climate-driven community changes to mechanistic processes across trophic, and taxonomic scales, whilst concurrently testing long-standing hypotheses for the contemporary mechanisms that maintain elevational ranges. The fellow will receive specific training in higher-level analytics of long-term ecological datasets and in expanding the scope of physiological and behavioral experiments into varied taxonomic groups.

In concert, the fellow will broaden participation in biology research and training by coordinating annual monitoring activities on field sites.

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.