NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2015

Johnson Anna L, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2015, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow to take transformative approaches to grand challenges in biology that employ biological collections in highly innovative ways. The title of the research plan for this fellowship to Anna L. Johnson is "Tracking the impact of species introductions and extinctions on ecological interaction network structure over 100 years in a diverse island ecosystem." The host institution for this fellowship is the University of Pittsburgh and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Tia-Lynn Ashman. A key challenge in ecology is to understand how species invasions and extinctions impact the structure and stability of complex ecological interaction networks as environmental change occurs. Plant-pollinator interaction networks provide valuable ecological services and are likely to be particularly susceptible to species loss. The fellowship research tracks the impact of species compositional shifts on pollinator-mediated pollen transport networks using an extensive herbarium collection of the flora of the Hawaiian Islands, collected by botanist Joseph C. F. Rock from 1909-the early 1920's. The Fellow is reconstructing historic pollen transport networks from herbarium specimens and then resampling contemporary flowering plant communities in the same regions of Hawaii to determine 1) whether network connectivity is lost at a proportionally slower rate than species in island pollination networks and 2) whether invasive plant species are nested within the pollination network, facilitating retention of network connectivity. The resulting data provide valuable insight into the ways that biological systems respond over long time periods to perturbations. It also pioneers new methods for pollen transport network construction and automation of pollen data collection, with broad applications to future research questions. Training goals include new sampling and analysis methods and gaining experience with a novel study system. Extensive community outreach, with the assistance of experienced science educators, consists of a schoolyard plant-pollinator network project that engages underserved K-12 students in Pittsburgh, PA in observing, interacting with and studying what they see in the natural world every day. Students are encouraged to make connections between their local ecosystems and faraway tropical ecosystems and conduct their own experiments. In addition, the research activities pioneer new methods for reconstructing historic pollen transport networks that can be applied to other herbarium collections. This project also generates voucher specimens from contemporary sampling and develops a pollen reference library, all of which will be made publicly available as part of the herbarium collection after completion of the research.