NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2016

Meineke Emily K, Raleigh NC

Investigators

Abstract

Postdoctoral Fellow: Emily Meineke Proposal number: 1611880 This award funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2016, Interdisciplinary 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 Emily Meineke is "Using museum specimens to explore if climate change has increased insect pest damage to forests." The host institution for this fellowship is the University of Copenhagen, and the sponsoring scientists are Aimee Classen and Nathan Sanders. This project addresses the fundamental question of how climate change driven by humans affect herbivore species that damage plant species on which humans rely. Global climate change has already led to higher outbreak frequencies in insect herbivores. However, less is known about how chronic, non-outbreak herbivores respond to climate. In particular, little is known about resident, native insects that live on plants for the duration of their lives and historically have caused no or minor damage to plants. Chronic herbivores and their damage are often unintentionally preserved on or in herbarium specimens, i.e. plant specimens preserved in museums. The Fellow is using herbarium specimens to track chronic herbivory over centuries and across Europe, taking advantage of northern Europe's expansive collection of forest tree specimens. She is also expanding this project using an existing citizen science platform to collect this same data from North American and Australian specimens. Because the Fellow's research contributes to the understanding of how climate has affected insect pests, it will also inform how insect pest damage might change in other systems on which we depend, including agriculture. The Fellow is expanding her scientific training in four key ways: (1) expanding her research program to include international (European) sites, (2) using modeling frameworks she used in her dissertation research but over much larger scales of space and time, (3) cultivating an international network of collaborators, and (4) creating and executing a unique, international citizen science project that generates continental-scale data. This project allows the public to participate in global change research and, in doing so, fosters connections between two US citizen science efforts, Notes from Nature and Your Wild Life, and a globally renowned European research institution, the University of Copenhagen. The Fellow is creating products for citizen scientist, such as online, interactive maps and figure, which allow the public to interact with data. With Your Wild Life, the Fellow is designing and evaluating our advertising efforts to maximize participation by groups underrepresented in biology.