This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project is to replace a cluster of greenhouse bays on the UCSB campus. The current greenhouse has four bays, is old and decrepit, and is scheduled for demolition. The University intends to replace the existing facility with a new greenhouse complex located adjacent to the old. This will have three components: (1) a three-bay greenhouse on the site of a lath house that is to be demolished, (2) a small greenhouse what will maintain alpine conditions, (the ?Alpine House?), to be newly built on a currently open site, and (3) a second three-bay greenhouse to be built on a site that currently holds two small buildings that will be demolished. The alpine house is designed to simulate the temperature, light and humidity of high alpine environments. The first component is already under construction as a separate project. The current project is to construct the second and third components, and to finish the interior of two of the three bays in the first component to make them operational. The existing greenhouse will ultimately be demolished.
The new greenhouse facility will enable year-round controlled environments and provide many options for experimental research that are unavailable with the current greenhouse. It will be possible to control light, watering regimes, and temperature, and to determine their impacts on plant growth and reproduction. The replacement facility will make it possible to exclude (or include) pollinators, pests and herbivores, and thus enable ecological, genetic and evolutionary experimental research that requires a controlled setting. The facility will be used for research on the specific morphological, physiological, and demographic traits responsible for the maintenance of plant diversity; the identification of the genetic basis for adaptations to extreme environments and specific pollinators; tests of how attributes of the physical environment influence plant distributions, productivity, and phenology; and research on the genetic mechanisms underlying plant recognition and responses to a variety of stresses such as drought. Work will include studies of the genetic and environmental controls of the critical events of flowering time, pollination, seed production, and germination. These studies include the discovery and analysis of the morphological and biochemical changes in floral structure that drive pollinator specialization.
In addition to providing infrastructure for research, the facility will be used for research training of undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral associates. Research that is likely to have societal impacts includes research on invasive species and their biological control, and research into the genetic mechanisms affecting seed quality and germination (which is relevant to the mitigation of crop losses.) The facility will be used to advance the development of a new model genomic system that will be made available to the wider research community.
The campus has a number of activities designed to facilitate the recruitment and financial support of members of underrepresented groups, economically disadvantaged students, and highly talented undergraduates. Students in these programs participate in plant biology research and will be able to take advantage of research training opportunities in the new greenhouses. The University?s Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration provides internship opportunities for undergraduates to provide hands-on botanical activities to students in local public schools.
Overview: This award funded the construction and renovation of the research greenhouses at UC Santa Barbara. The project resulted in seven greenhouse bays comprising over 5000 sq. ft. Each bay has its own environmental controls for lighting, temperature and watering providing the opportunity to simultaneously conduct experiments replicating a wide variety of environmental conditions. One bay has air-conditioned benches, which allows the production of the high light and cool temperatures of alpine environments. Conditions in this bay will also likely be able to produce the constant low temperatures and long day lengths found in the arctic. Thus, plant scientists at UC Santa Barbara now have the research facilities to conduct experiments to test the specific morphological, physiological, and demographic traits responsible for the maintenance of plant diversity; identification of the genetic basis for adaptations to extreme environments and specific pollinators; tests of the how attributes of the physical environment influences plant distributions, productivity, and phenology; and an understanding of the genetic mechanisms underlying plant recognition and responses to a variety of stresses such as drought. Intellectual Merit. Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have conducted a number of experiments in the new facility that were previously impossible. Examples of how the facility has been used include the exclusion of pollinators and the production of large numbers plants through controlled crosses to determine the genetic basis of a variety of plant traits studied in the Hodges’ laboratory. One experiment is determining the genetic basis for variation in flower color in columbines (Aquilegia) and how these differences affect plant physiology. In another experiment, the genetic basis and physiological consequences of a natural mutation causing petals to be transformed into sepals in Aquilegia coerulea is being investigated. In yet another experiment, the genetic basis of for a key innovation (a trait that is causally linked to the evolution of many species) in Aquilegia, the petal nectar spur is being determined. Again, the production of a large number of individuals segregating for the presence/absence of nectar spurs is being used to genetically map the location of the gene(s) involved with the morphological novelty. The alpine house is being used to study the genetic basis of adaptation to the alpine environment. Plants that grow in the alpine environment are often quite small compared to their non-alpine relatives. This is true for the diminutive columbine Aquilegia jonesii, which forms plants just a few inches in height. These plants are now being grown at UC Santa Barbara for the very first time and will be used to determine the genetic changes that have allowed this species to survive in the extreme alpine environment. Other researchers have proposed to use the alpine house facility to study changes in climate may alter the dynamics of nutrient cycling in arctic soil by bringing soil cores from the arctic and maintaining them under various temperature regimes. The new research greenhouses are also being used by the Mazer laboratory to detect evidence for genetically based variation in -- and covariation among -- ecologically important physiological, life history, and floral traits within and among wild plant populations of two sister species with contrasting mating systems in the genus, Clarkia. One goal of this work is to determine whether genetic differentiation among populations and between taxa is associated with local climatic conditions in a way that may facilitate predictions concerning the long-term effects of climate change on the evolution of physiological, life history, floral traits, and mating system. The new greenhouses provide enough environmentally controlled space to be able to conduct, for the first time at UCSB, the kind of "common garden" experiment that this research requires – which entails monitoring over 1200 plants. Broader Impacts. The UCSB greenhouse facility is enhancing the success of our undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Already, five undergraduates (including one woman) studying in the Hodges’ laboratory have utilized the greenhouses for their research. These undergraduates were recruited through the Faculty Research Assistance Program (FRAP) and one has earned an Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (URCA) Grant for his studies. A graduate student is conducting part of his research (funded with an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant) and an NIH-NRSA postdoctoral fellow is conducting her research (partially funded by a Harvey L. Karp Discovery award for the best postdoctoral research in the Math, Physical and Life Sciences at UCSB) in the facility. In the Mazer laboratory, 13 undergraduate students (10 female) are conducting research in the facility including three recruited through the FRAP program. In addition, from the Mazer laboratory there is one graduate student and one postdoc (both women) utilizing the greenhouses for their research. Multiple other laboratories have also utilized the new greenhouses. The new facilities were also quite favorably viewed by, and helped our recruitment of, two new female faculty members this past year.
