This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2015, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow to take transformative approaches to grand challenges in biology that employ biological collections in highly innovative ways. The title of the research plan for this fellowship to Benjamin Freeman is "Understanding tropical montane biodiversity: Is interspecific competition important?" The host institution for this fellowship is the University of British Columbia, and the sponsoring scientist is Dolph Schluter.
Tropical mountains are the most biodiverse terrestrial ecosystems on Earth. This "megadiversity" arises largely because species occupy narrow elevational distributions. Elevational specialization is due to both abiotic and biotic factors, but the influence of interactions between species has been largely ignored. Interspecific competition is an important biotic interaction that can influence how species' traits evolve and where species live on both regional and local spatial scales. Typically, interspecific competition is mediated by functional traits; therefore, species that have similar traits, e.g., similar beak size and shape, compete for resources more intensely than species with very different functional traits. The fellowship research uses museum collections including the American Museum of Natural History to generate a large, freely available database of functional traits in songbirds. Using this database, hypotheses about interspecific competition mediated by functional traits can be examined as an important mechanism that explains why tropical mountains harbor such diverse avifaunas. Specifically, the hypotheses are 1) Functional traits explain what species of tropical birds can occur at the same elevations along elevational gradients, 2) Interspecific competition shapes the geographic distributions of tropical montane birds, and 3) Interspecific competition drives phenotypic evolution in tropical montane birds. Results promise to explain why tropical montane regions are biodiversity hotspots and test the validity of current "abiotic-only" models.
Training goals are to gain expertise in data analysis and acquire quantitative skills relevant to biodiversity science, such as species distribution modeling and macroecological analyses. Educational outreach involves mentoring and providing research experiences for undergraduate biology students. Public outreach includes lectures and continuing to publish articles in the Living Bird, a quarterly magazine with a circulation of more than 60,000.
