NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2018

Palmer Meredith S, Roseville MN

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2018, Broadening Participation of Groups Under-represented in Biology. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow that will increase the participation of groups underrepresented in biology. The research focus is to understand the mechanisms underlying predator-prey dynamics in natural systems. Prey make behavioral decisions to decrease their chances of getting eaten, but the circumstances that elicit particular anti-predator responses are still poorly understood. As the choice of prey behavior can have cascading impacts on ecosystem dynamics, much work has been attempted to define how prey make these decisions. However, many of these models fail to predict observed anti-predator strategies in nature. The fellow will develop a new predator-prey framework, incorporating a rarely-explored dimension of complex communities. How predators modify their activity in response to competitors may substantially alter the risk prey ultimately experience. The fellow will study behavior of mammalian herbivores in ecosystems throughout Africa, using extensive networks of camera-traps to capture prey behavioral strategies under different predation regimes. To accomplish these aims, the fellow will work extensively with local scientists and students, providing valuable training to African K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students, in addition to running capacity building workshops with government and non-governmental agencies. The fellow will develop teaching tools and citizen science programs to introduce the general public in the US and abroad to key concepts in ecology and conservation. This research will quantify non-additive effects of multiple predators on overall predation risk by examining how prey mitigate combined risk at multiple spatial and temporal scales. The fellow test (I) whether predator-predator interactions affect how aggregate predation risk is structured spatiotemporally across a landscape, and (II) explore whether these synergies are modulated by functional traits of the prey or the environment by (III) developing novel statistical approaches for using camera-trap data. This framework will be parameterized using data from intact systems and tested to see whether removing hypothesized linkages between different predators predicts prey behavior in degraded systems where portions of the predator guild are extinct. The fellow will be working in multiple African countries during the course of this research and will expend significant effort training students locally and globally. She will also work to increase the participation of diverse groups in STEM by developing citizen science and online educational tools. 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.