All living things require elements like carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus in specific proportions to grow. As a result, the relative availability of these elements in an ecosystem can have major impacts on the growth and performance of organisms, the biodiversity of biological communities, and the provisioning of ecosystem services like water quality. Yet, human activities, including burning fossil fuels, urban and residential development, and agricultural practices, are rapidly changing the absolute and relative abundance of these elements. This Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-2 Focused EPSCoR Collaboration (RII Track-2 FEC) award will permit researchers from four EPSCoR jurisdictions (AR, NE, VT, and WY) to address how current and changing elemental availability impacts ecosystems at regional and national scales. To do this, researchers will combine growing environmental datasets from national efforts with ongoing and historical studies at smaller scales to produce a publicly available database containing information on both the elemental composition of organisms and the elemental composition of those organisms’ environment. The effort will focus on stream, lake, and other inland water ecosystems, providing the opportunity to also address eutrophication issues found within each jurisdiction. The project team will engage in workforce development through professional training opportunities, develop database activities that expose graduate and undergraduate students to ecological questions, engage with artists to better communicate findings to general audiences, and promote diversity, equity, and inclusivity through professional partnerships, e.g., the Society for Freshwater Science’s Instars and Emerge program.
Ecological stoichiometry (ES) applies first principles to examine how the differential supply of elements constrains organisms and their interactions. Through this collaboration, we will combine ES theory with ‘big data’ harvesting and analysis tools to build the research capability and human resource capacity to investigate stoichiometric control of ecological phenomena occurring across scales that we currently cannot investigate. Specifically, we propose to: 1) harness environmental data collected across wide spatial and temporal scales to build a new database called the Stoichiometric Traits of Organisms In their Chemical Habitats (STOICH), 2) develop new tools to address statistical and data visual challenges to studying elemental ratios and their ecological implications, and 3) build capacity in four EPSCoR jurisdictions for cutting-edge ecological and environmental research. We will focus this capacity initially on three research aims: 1) elucidate stoichiometric controls on critical biogeochemical cycles, 2) understand how food web structure and function respond to elemental mismatches, and 3) investigate how elemental supply impacts functional trait diversity in biological communities. The principal investigators include early career scientists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of Wyoming, University of Central Arkansas, and Middlebury College. Each jurisdiction also includes a senior scientist as a mentor to early career faculty. The project will support three postdoctoral fellows, five graduate students, and many undergraduate research trainees. Trainees will benefit from the diversity of campuses involved that include R1, R2, and primarily undergraduate institutions. We will actively engage and recruit underrepresented communities by holding ES-related topical workshops at professional society meetings with successful mentoring programs.
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.
