This action funds an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY 2004. The goal of the fellowship is to increase the participation of minority scientists at the postdoctoral level and to prepare them for positions of scientific leadership in academia and industry. To attain this goal, the fellowship provides opportunities for postdoctoral training and research of the highest quality to recent doctoral recipients. It is expected that Fellows supported through these fellowships will play important roles in training of the future workforce.
The research and training plan is entitled "Predicting the response of grassland plant community composition to expected future environmental conditions." Human activities are altering global environments in several interrelated ways. Ecosystem-scale experiments using simulated future environments have documented the responses of some of the world's natural systems to a number of potential global changes. Several have demonstrated that changes in plant community composition (i.e. changes in the plant species or groups of species present at a particular location) can drive whole-ecosystem responses to environmental modification, but effective frameworks for predicting changes in the prevalence of species or functional groups are largely absent. This research is developing predictive vegetation models that incorporate "bottom-up" (i.e. resource availability) and "top-down" (i.e. herbivore mediated) controls on community composition and production.
