NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2019: Lessons from museums: impacts of urbanization on biodiversity and the importance of natural history collections

Ruzi, Selina, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2019, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow who will utilize biological collections in innovative ways. Habitat loss from urbanization is a threat to species biodiversity. Most studies compare rural and urban biodiversity, rather than looking at how the species present in one location change through time. Museum collections can provide valuable historical data on what species have been collected in an area for decades. The fellow will use the bee and ant specimens at the North Carolina State University Insect Museum to understand biodiversity change in Wake, Durham, and Chatham counties, North Carolina. These counties contain three metropolitan areas that have undergone extensive urban growth. Bees pollinate a large proportion of agricultural crops, and are critically important in maintaining native plant biodiversity. Ants engage in plant defense, seed dispersal, and help decomposition in the soil. These activities make both bees and ants important for ecosystem function. The research will use trait-based and landscape-scale analyses to assess how bee and ant biodiversity have changed over time, and to identify drivers of change. The project will also evaluate ways to increase public appreciation of museum natural history collections which tend to be inaccessible and undervalued. This information will also provide best practices for urban planning decisions that protect ecosystem services and create models for how educational materials can be evaluated and implemented. This research has four objectives: (1) Determine how biodiversity of bees and ants have changed with urbanization intensity over the past 100 years, specifically with regards to whether there is a reduction in native species. Urban intensity will be evaluated using road density as a proxy. (2) Use a trait-based approach to determine how the urbanization process has affected which species persist, and (3) use machine learning and simulation models to predict how projected patterns of urbanization will affect future biodiversity patterns. Morphological traits (e.g., body size) will be measured from physical specimens, while other traits (e.g., nesting location) will be collected from literature and species descriptions. (4) Create immersive (e.g. virtual reality) and standard media experiences using the results from objectives 1-3 to illustrate how bee and ant biodiversity has changed over time, and assess the effectiveness of these experiences in increasing public opinion of and appreciation for, publicly funded museum collections. The fellow will receive training in urban ecology, social science, taxonomy, and methods including machine learning and geospatial analyses. The fellow will also be trained in science communication and directly engage with museum visitors through museum events. 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.