Collaborative proposal: Combining NEON and remotely sensed habitats to determine climate impacts on community dynamics

The impact of environmental change on biological communities will depend on interactions involving the local habitat and species that interact with one another - as each species responds directly to environmental conditions, it indirectly affects all of the species with which it interacts. Species interactions complicate our ability to predict organismal response to environmental change, because each species experiences habitat complexity at a different scale - from flightless insects to large vertebrates. Current species distribution models used to anticipate community responses to climate predict species in isolation from one another, ignoring interactions. This research approach will advance ecological forecasting methods by a developing a new modeling approach that analyzes the combined responses of species to climate, habitat, and one another. The study offers a framework for synthesizing environmental and biological data across the National Ecological Observation Network (NEON) network, one that can be exploited by the scientific community for integration with their own analyses. The project will engage the public through citizen-assisted identification of animal images. New data on large mammals and seed production from NEON sites will be made available to the community, and forecasts of community responses to climate will be made available through a web site. A workshop will be offered for training of advanced doctoral students, postdocs, and academic and agency scientists in the use of the modeling tools and NEON data. The study will train two graduate students, including a program in science communication, and involve four undergraduate students in fieldwork.

This research will synthesize taxonomically diverse communities that are monitored in NEON (ground beetles, vascular plants, small mammals, birds) with new data on mast, and large mammal surveys. Mast is one of several habitat variables that interacts with climate variation. A focus on the mast system of pulsed seed and fruit production from trees includes vertebrate consumers, as well as indirect interactions with arthropod competitors and vertebrate predators. Remotely-sensed imagery and the NEON airborne observatory will be used to characterize habitat diversity. New sampling at NEON sites for large mammals and seed production will add key components that allow us to evaluate the community dynamics of masting tree systems at broad scales. Results of this analysis will be used to forecast community change and reorganization, including prediction and attribution of climate risk by species and habitat and how it is shared across species groups.

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.