Conference: Recent advances in the mechanistic understanding of avian responses to environmental challenges

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

This conference award supports participants in a symposium and associated poster session on understanding avian responses to environmental challenges, at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) in January 2024. Birds inhabit some of the most variable and extreme environments on the planet, and recent advances in the lab and field have led to discoveries about the mechanisms that enable birds to overcome physiological challenges of all kinds, including extreme long-distance flight, heat and cold, osmotic challenges, low oxygen, and immune challenges. The symposium will advance the collective understanding of the physiological strategies that birds use to survive in challenging environments, and to promote discussion among the participants in an attempt to establish new and strengthen existing connections, find common themes, and discuss future directions in the field. By bringing together physiologists with disparate expertise from various career stages and backgrounds, including undergraduate and graduate students in the poster session, common themes will be identified and new approaches that promote future innovation and collaborations will be discussed. Participants will prepare a synthetic, forward-looking paper to be published in the SICB journal, Integrative and Comparative Biology. The individual symposium presentations will also be published and disseminated in the same journal issue. Birds are among the most widely distributed endotherms on the planet, living in many types of inhospitable environments. In the face of environmental challenges, the basic principles that allow for survival can be similar among species, even in response to very different challenges. However, the underlying mechanisms, suite of physiological responses, and selection on those traits differ significantly, and their influence and impact from an ecological or evolutionary perspective can vary as well. It is the goal of the supported symposium to highlight physiological mechanisms underlying avian responses to environmental challenges and to facilitate the synthesis of new discoveries with established findings in order to provide an informed understanding of the current state of the art in the field, to highlight new tools, and to identify future research opportunities and collaborations. Furthermore, one of the many enduring impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic is that early-career researchers have not had as many opportunities to network, develop professional relationships, or present their research in a way that maximizes exposure to the research community. Therefore, the symposium specifically highlights the excellent research being conducted by early-career scientists, with an emphasis on promoting women in science. The symposium also includes a number of more senior avian researchers to develop and broaden mentoring networks among the speakers. In addition, the participation of five or more undergraduate and graduate students in a complementary poster session will provide current students the opportunity to build important professional relationships. 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.