NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Biology provide opportunities for young scientists to conduct research abroad, to establish productive international collaborations, and to take advantage of unique research and training opportunities. These outcomes are mutually beneficial to the United States and to the foreign hosts. This fellowship to Michael L. Logan supports research and training that combines physiological ecology and evolutionary biology to explore biological consequences of climate gradients in a population of lizards in the Cape region of South Africa. The host institution for this fellowship is Stellenbosch University and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Susana Clusella-Trullas. Over the course of this study, a blog entitled Evolution in Action: South Africa serves as a discussion forum through which members of the general public are invited to accompany the Fellow into the field so that they may take part in the process of data collection. The fellowship provides training in the development of new assays and novel data analysis techniques and is being funded by the Office of International and Integrative Activities and the Directorate for Biological Sciences.
Developing models that accurately forecast the responses of animal and plant populations to rapid environmental changes has proven useful to direct further research, establish new knowledge about biological responses, and for guiding public policy. Recent research results predict that certain taxonomic groups, such as lizards, are especially susceptible to changes in climate. But predictive models often assume that the characteristics of species that determine how they will respond to climate change, e.g., the temperatures at which they perform best, are fixed. In other words, it is assumed that they cannot evolve in response to a changing climate. Yet strong evidence suggests that many species have the capacity to evolve rapidly, and they might therefore be able partially to mitigate the negative effects of a changing environment through evolutionary adaptation. Experimentally manipulating whole populations to test how climate change may serve as an agent of natural selection is difficult, but natural geographic variation in climate can be used as a proxy for these effects. In this research, natural selection is being measured in several populations of Cordylid lizards occurring across environments that differ dramatically with respect to climate. These estimates of selection are then being used to predict the rate of evolutionary change that might occur in response to a warmer climate. By understanding the role of evolution in the response of species to climate change, a critical component of realism can be added to predictive models.
