ORCC: Migratory organisms in a changing world: from the molecular basis of migratory timing to models predicting the effects of specific conservation strategies.

About This Grant

Animals time many of their behaviors to coincide with features of the environment. Climate change is affecting this synchrony and this mismatch will have cascading effects on our ecosystems. This project will examine the connection between migratory timing and resource availability in a songbird. Resources on the breeding grounds (e.g., insects important for raising young) are peaking earlier each year. Songbirds may not be able to respond to these changes, modifying the timing of their migration to arrive on the breeding grounds earlier. This mismatch is not only of concern to researchers; federal and state wildlife agencies are also trying to prepare for the downstream consequences of this phenomenon. Accordingly, this project was designed in collaboration with wildlife agencies. Results will help policy makers assess existing protection policies and test new management plans for migratory songbirds. Local outreach along the migratory flyway is also planned (e.g., educational programming on migration that will connect children across North and South America). Underrepresented groups in STEM will also be recruited in this project and included in both the research and outreach plans. Plasticity and adaptation could allow migrants to advance their migratory timing, but direct estimates of these mechanisms and their molecular basis are rare and restricted to a small number of proximate populations. This project will begin filling this knowledge gap, using state-of-the-art tools from several disciplines (e.g., animal movement ecology, genomics and computer modeling) and data from a broad geographic scale. Specifically, (1) plasticity and (2) adaptation for migratory timing will be estimated and (3) the molecular basis of this trait will be examined. Estimates of plasticity and adaptation will then be (4) integrated into models predicting how populations will respond to climate change and specific conservation strategies being proposed for this group. The species chosen for this work already shows advances in their migratory timing, but these advances are weaker in populations that breed further north. This trend could relate to the fact that environmental conditions on the breeding grounds are less predictable for northern breeders and is a question this project will address. Results from this project will be relevant to many fields (e.g., genetics, behavior and evolution) and the predictive framework can be used for other systems, traits and environmental variation. 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.