CAREER: Integrating undergraduate research, citizen science, and museum genomics to explore a century of change in North American birds

Occidental College, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

How life responds to change is one of the key questions in biology. The last 100 years have witnessed habitat changes to the planet at an accelerating pace. Very little is known about how species respond to this, because there are usually no detailed historical records of where species lived or what they were like in the past. Specimens from natural history museums, however, can provide a snapshot in time of what species were like decades ago. This project takes advantage of an unparalleled museum collection of North and Middle American birds from the 1930s to 1950s. Using new technology that can extract DNA from these specimens, the researchers will compare historic and modern samples to understand how the genomes of birds have changed in response to changes to their habitats. Additionally, records of bird sightings from the historical field notes will be compared to thousands of modern observation records collected by citizen scientists to determine how the geographic distributions of birds have changed. Combining research with outreach, an international resurvey effort will work with citizen-science experts at eBird to compare bird species at 300 sites originally sampled between 1933 and 1955. Joint, international field resurveys of 15 historic collecting sites will provide complementary on-the-ground data collected by experts. Results of this research will provide unprecedented detail to changes in the genomic and distributional landscape of birds at a continental scale. All facets of the work will be integrated with an undergraduate research program that will train the next generation of biologists with the latest genomics equipment and techniques well-suited to both the public and private sector. The researchers will assess changes in the DNA of 20 focal bird species whose habitats have been dramatically altered in modern times. The comparisons of historical to modern samples will test whether species in the western coastal lowlands of southern North America have experienced range expansion due to the conversion of native thornscrub habitat to irrigated cropland, and whether highland conifer forest species have experienced loss of genetic diversity due to habitat fragmentation. DNA will be extracted using thousands of conserved genomic anchors that can capture and retrieve the damaged DNA found in older museum specimens. Later analysis will stitch these smaller fragments into larger pieces, allowing for genomic analysis of diversity and connectivity among populations and comparison between time points. Genomic research using next-generation sequencing techniques, particularly using conserved elements, has yet to study evolution at such a shallow scale in vertebrates. This research will clarify the utility of conserved genomic fragments in discovering the impact of habitat degradation and other human influences on the genomes of wild organisms.