Research and News
Featured Research:
Climate variability and its impact on life histories of species around the world
How will climate variability associated with climate change influence global patterns of biodiversity in the future? To address this question, six IBEEM Postdoctoral Fellows — Adriana Uscanga Castillo, Jeff Doser, Kelly Kapsar, Lala Kounta, Peter Williams, and Casey Youngflesh — are synthesizing a collection of existing big data resources on global climate, species traits, and species ranges, in order to characterize environmental variability across the globe and the role it plays in shaping communities of birds and mammals. The baseline environmental variability of a given system is likely to dictate the conditions under which a species is likely to persist, yet little attention has been given to the role of interannual variability in environmental conditions among years in determining species ranges, and how such variability relates to species traits on a global scale. In this project, the postdocs are leveraging their collective expertise with big spatial data, time-series analysis, and high-performance computing with MSU’s Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research (ICER) High Performance Computing Cluster (HPCC) to characterize environmental variability using available global climate datasets. With these data, they are exploring the degree to which environmental variability explains the distribution and composition of life-history functional traits. This work will enhance understanding of how environmental variability influences the eco evolutionary processes that structure ecological systems. By quantifying the magnitude of abiotic change relative to historical variability across the globe, the work will have implications for predicting which systems might be most resilient to future abiotic change, and can help in prioritizing conservation to meet goals and targets set forth by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, including conserving 30% of the world’s biodiversity by 2030 (30x30).
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Institute for Biodiversity, Ecology, Evolution, and Macrosystems
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
ibeem@msu.edu
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
ibeem@msu.edu