NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2016

Forrestel Elisabeth J, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

Postdoctoral Fellow: Elisabeth J. Forrestel Proposal Number: 1612237 This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2016, 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 Elisabeth Forrestel is "Linking phenology and functional traits to climate responses of diverse winegrapes" The host institutions for this fellowship are Harvard University and INRA Montpellier (France), and the sponsoring scientists are Drs. Elizabeth Wolkovich and Thierry Lacombe. The goal of this project is to understand how altered temperature and precipitation together affect the coordination of plant functional traits and their associated ecosystem services. The Fellow is exploring this question by studying the coordination of plant phenology and a suite of plant functional traits related to water use and drought tolerance in winegrapes (Vitis vinifera L.). Understanding how plants respond to multiple environmental drivers is a fundamental goal of both plant physiological and functional ecology. To date, however, research has focused on a limited set of trait responses to single environmental variables, severely limiting our understanding of how altered temperature and precipitation together will affect the coordination of plant functional traits. In particular, phenology, i.e., the timing of recurring life history events, is rarely incorporated into studies of plant function. This is despite the fact that a change in phenology is the most widely observed response of plants to climate change. The Fellow is using the world's two largest living collections of winegrapes at the French National Institute of Agriculture (INRA Domaine de Vassal) in Southern France and the USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository for Tree Fruit, Nut Crops and Grapes in Winters, California. The winegrapes in these collections vary over two months in ripening time and also exhibit a wide range of functional diversity. The Fellow is transcribing phenological records, and measuring physiological and functional traits on a diverse set of varieties in these collections to test for the coordination between plant functional strategies and phenological shifts in response to climate. The Fellow is also using these data to build biologically realistic phenological models and make the first robust predictions of climate change effects on wine growing regions. The Fellow is gaining expertise in climate and phenological modeling, and integrating perspectives from ecological and agricultural sciences into her research repertoire. She is also establishing important international and interdisciplinary collaborations. The Fellow's research is yielding results that are highly relevant to the future of an economically and culturally important crop, and all data generated including phenological models and projections are being made publicly available. The Fellow is also mentoring undergraduates, and is actively engaging the community with her research. In collaboration with botanists and chefs, the Fellow is offering public seminars and dinner series focused on the evolutionary and cultural history of food, which includes her work on winegrapes. In conjunction with the series, the Fellow is developing teaching modules for high school and undergraduate students, in which students keep journals on the evolutionary history of what the foods they eat, in order to explore and appreciate plant diversity.