RUI/Collaborative Research: Mice-o-scapes: Using isotopes to understand the effect of climate and landscape change on small mammal ecology over the past 100 years

RUI/合作研究：Mice-o-scapes：利用同位素了解过去 100 年来气候和景观变化对小型哺乳动物生态的影响

• 批准号: 1638678
• 负责人: Rebecca Terry
• 金额: $ 13.87万
• 依托单位: Oregon State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-01-15 至 2021-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1638678&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RUI; Collaborative; Research; Mice; scapes

Climate, vegetation, and land-use change have had a dramatic impact on environments and species ecology across the United States over the past 100 years. Understanding these impacts is necessary for guiding future conservation and management decisions, and for developing indicators to assess ecosystem health. While much work has focused on the response of ecosystems to these changes on local or regional scales, many questions remain as to how climate and landscape changes will affect ecosystems at a continental scale. Small mammals, such as rodents, represent a significant proportion of the mammalian species in North America, and are bellweathers of ecosystem change. Small mammals record many aspects of their diet and environment in their tissues via stable isotopes, but key questions remain about the spatial scale represented by small-mammal isotopes and the aspects of the environment that they record.This work will fill a major gap in our understanding of the climatic and environmental controls on stable isotopes recorded by small mammals at a continental scale. Specifically, we will combine biogeochemistry and modeling techniques using modern specimens obtained from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) combined with historical specimens from natural history museums. We will determine how the isotopic composition of small mammals varies in relation to continental-scale climate and vegetation gradients and create mice-o-scapes?isotope landscape models predicting the stable isotopic composition of small-mammal hair across the United States. These landscape models will allow us to better understand the spatial scales and environmental variables recorded by small mammals, as well as differences in diet among species. We will then use historical small-mammal specimens obtained from various museum collections to assess how small mammals have responded to environmental change from the late 19th century to the present. We will target four different regions of the United States that have undergone dramatic but different forms of land-use change over the past 100 years, including urbanization, agricultural expansion, deforestation, and grassland-rangeland transition. This project emphasizes the importance of integrating museum collections as archives of ecological change with the NEON network, while helping to establish the careers of the young female research team and increasing research opportunities for underrepresented minorities at a Hispanic-serving institution.

在过去的100年中，气候，植被和土地利用变化对美国环境和物种生态学产生了巨大影响。了解这些影响是指导未来的保护和管理决策以及制定指标以评估生态系统健康的必要条件。尽管许多工作集中在生态系统对这些变化对本地或区域规模的变化的反应上，但关于气候和景观变化将如何影响大陆规模的生态系统的许多问题。小型哺乳动物，例如啮齿动物，代表着北美的哺乳动物物种中很大一部分，并且是生态系统变化的氛围。小型哺乳动物通过稳定的同位素记录其组织中饮食和环境的许多方面，但是关于以小型哺乳动物同位素和它们记录的环境方面表示的空间尺度的关键问题仍然存在。这项工作将填补我们对稳定同位素对稳定的同位素对稳定型哺乳动物的气候和环境控制的理解。 具体来说，我们将使用从国家生态天文台网络（NEON）获得的现代标本结合生物地球化学和建模技术，并结合自然历史博物馆的历史标本。 我们将确定小型哺乳动物的同位素组成如何与大陆尺度的气候和植被梯度有关，并创建小鼠 - O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-Os-Otipope景观模型，预测了整个美国小型乳腺头发的稳定同位素组成。这些景观模型将使我们能够更好地了解小型哺乳动物记录的空间尺度和环境变量，以及物种之间饮食的差异。然后，我们将使用从各种博物馆收藏中获得的历史小型哺乳动物标本来评估小型哺乳动物对从19世纪后期到现在的环境变化的反应。在过去的100年中，我们将瞄准美国四个不同地区的土地利用变化，包括城市化，农业扩张，森林砍伐和草地兰格兰德过渡。该项目强调将博物馆收藏作为生态变化与霓虹灯网络的档案的重要性，同时帮助建立了年轻的女性研究团队的职业，并增加了在西班牙裔服务机构中代表性不足的少数民族的研究机会。