Eli S. Bridge, Ph.D. - US grants

A wealth of research in the biological and social sciences has demonstrated that rearing environment is an important contributor to offspring development. Are these developmental effects adaptive in terms of molding an individual to match current environmental conditions? The co-PIs will first test whether variation in provisioning behavior by breeding Florida Scrub-Jays gives rise to differences, both physiological and behavioral, in the resulting offspring. The research will then follow the survival and reproduction of these offspring to assess whether the developmental pathways determined by their parent's provisioning behaviors do indeed match the offspring phenotype to the current environment. Florida Scrub-Jays breed as family units, with older siblings helping to rear the most recent brood of nestlings. Hence, findings with respect to the rearing environment and its potential to affect physical and mental aspects of the emerging adults will have implications for other species with complex social systems (like humans). Furthermore, through a multifaceted approach to monitoring physical, physiological, and behavioral aspects of focal birds, the co-PIs will be able to provide insight into the mechanisms that drive environmental influences on offspring development (preliminary data suggest an important role for secretion of the 'stress hormone' corticosterone, early in life). A key component of the research will be the development of a new automated feeding technology to manipulated food availability and provisioning rates in particular family groups. This approach, which will use radio frequency identification to selectively administer food to targeted individuals, will introduce an inexpensive yet powerful tool for studies that require manipulation of the feeding environment. Previous work by the co-PIs has demonstrated that food supplementation can increase the number of young produced in this Threatened species, and the improved delivery system the co-PIs will use in this research will be a powerful conservation tool that can be used by managers of other threatened and endangered species.

The field work will take place at Archbold Biological Station in Central Florida, and will contribute to this institution's infrastructure and legacy of high-quality research. Finally, the research will provide training opportunities for a number of undergraduates (or recent graduates), two Ph.D. students, and two post-doctoral researchers; and it will help enrich Archbold's K-12 education programs.

Migration is a way for animals to take advantage of predictable changes in food availability. It is unclear how migrants will respond to the changes in the seasonality of food abundance that are caused by global change. Predicting how global change will affect migrant populations requires knowing how unique migration strategies arise and persist, which in turn requires an intense focus on populations where multiple migration strategies exist. However, local populations that harbor such variation are extremely rare. One such population exists in Painted Buntings (Passerina ciris). Based on chemical analyses of feathers, it appears that about half the birds molt in a single dry location while a significant minority appear to initiate molt in a more moist location. This project will track the locations of individual birds through their annual cycle by using a small geolocation device (0.7g). The project will reveal factors that enable different migration strategies to co-exist within populations and it will evaluate the carry-over impacts of these strategies on the reproductive success of migrants.

The tiny geolocators developed for this project will improve scientific research by greatly expanding the range of animal body sizes for which it is possible to track movements. A Ph.D. student will be trained to pioneer the combined use of stable isotope ratios and geolocators to track migrants while gaining significant international experience. The project will also provide significant training opportunities for a Post-doc and a second graduate student. The researchers will expand their ongoing educational collaborations with public schools and local zoos to include technological aspects of animal tracking and Painted Bunting migration.

Until recently, knowledge of the migratory movements of small birds was based only on idiosyncratic band returns and inferences from biomarkers and population demographics. Although researchers have been able to track large birds for decades using various electronic devices, traditional long-distance tracking methods, such as satellite telemetry, employ tags that are far too large for the majority of bird species (those weighting 20 grams or less). However, a new tool has emerged that can revolutionize our understanding of bird migration. Solar-geolocation data loggers, or geologgers, are extremely small and simple tracking devices that store light-intensity readings at regular intervals for determining both day length, which indicates latitude, and the time of solar noon, which indicates longitude. Geologgers have recently been deployed on several small bird species and the success of these early studies has sparked considerable interest in these devices among scientists and bird enthusiasts.
Although geologgers are already yielding exciting results, there is a need to improve the instrumentation (both hardware and software), establish guidelines for the use of geologgers, and increase their accessibility to the scientific community. A major goal of this project is to improve upon an existing geologger design to create a device that can be deployed in large numbers on a wide range of species by virtually any research group or institution. A second goal is to generate sophisticated yet accessible analysis tools that incorporate multiple sources of information into a Bayesian framework for generating the best possible estimates of migration tracks. Specifically this project seeks to: 1) reduce the size of geologger hardware; 2) repackage an underused but powerful analysis package (tripEstimation) for processing geologger data; 3) increase the availability of geologgers by offering assembled units, electronic kits, and do-it-yourself instructions; 4) carry out extensive field testing and analyses to evaluate the accuracy of the devices and their effects on bird behavior; and 5) reduce the cost of geologgers by an order of magnitude.

Making geologgers available to large-scale banding operations and researchers with limited funds will promote a tremendous scientific advance that will reverberate across numerous disciplines. As information from multiple tracking efforts is synthesized, researchers will be able to establish connectivity maps linking breeding and wintering areas used by different populations of migratory birds. These activities will enable comprehensive conservation strategies that can identify critical habitats for migratory birds and protect vulnerable species throughout their annual cycles. To help ensure that this sort of data synthesis is possible, the geologger software resulting from this project will be implemented through Movebank.org, an online repository for storing and distributing animal tracking data. Scientists who use Movebank.org will contribute to a resource used by students and researchers worldwide ranging from professional wildlife biologists seeking to advance evolutionary theory to grade-school children working on science fair projects.
Tracking animals with geologgers requires a synthesis of biology, earth science, electrical engineering, and mathematics. As such, geologger studies are excellent material for addressing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) learning objectives. Working through The University of Oklahoma K20, a collaborative group of project personnel and schoolteachers will generate lesson plans for K-12 students based on the concept of solar geolocation and the construction of microprocessor-based data loggers. These lesson plans will reach teachers across the US and abroad through the K20alt website, maintained by the K20 Center.

Earth's seasonality produces a flow of energy, information, and biodiversity between tropical and temperate regions. Much of this flow occurs through the aerosphere is a broad diversity of migratory animals. Long distance migration and dispersal is an important contributor to the rapid seasonal redistribution of productivity, spread of disease, and shifts in biodiversity across and among continents. Visualizing and modeling the collective behaviors of the diversity of animals that use the aerosphere for foraging, dispersal, and migration is pivotal to understanding and forecasting continental macroecological dynamics; and will be a core focus of this project. This EAGER award will focus on a high-risk approach building a mechanistic understanding of macroecological dynamics in the aerosphere based on the NEXRAD network of weather surveillance radars. The combination of recent and ongoing advances in radar technology, computation capabilities and data processing workflows, primarily in meteorology, have brought researchers to the edge of a revolution in the capacity to use weather radars as a biological sensors system. However, outside of meteorology, this resource is vastly under-used due to a general lack of analysis tools and data sets tailored to biologists. This EAGER award will focus on improved infrastructure and validation on providing radar-based metrics of distribution, density, and diversity of animals in the aerosphere. This project will include an integrated series of observational, experimental, and modeling studies that will result in a set of tools, products, and applications that enable transformative science in aeroecology.

The broader impacts of this award will increase the availability and interpretability of radar data for investigations in environmental biology and building an interdisciplinary training environment at the interface of ecology, spatial modeling, computer science and meteorology. The radar tools and products that are developed will be widely distributed and make major contributions to basic understanding of aeroecology, which will be useful in (1) minimizing the impact of wind power development; (2) aviation safety; and (3) evaluation of ecosystem services. This project will lead a growing culture of interdisciplinary research by supporting a post-doc and student in an interdisciplinary group project with co-advisors and committee members from different disciplines (i.e. biology, computer science, and meteorology).

The Electronic Transponder Analysis Gateway (ETAG) is a software system enabling a biological observatory by providing professional data management and versatile data dissemination to a growing community of researchers who use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to better understand animal behavior. RFID allows for short-range wireless communication between small transponder tags and readers, and it can facilitate tracking of individual items or animals that are equipped with a tag. RFID is a mature and ubiquitous technology, familiar to people in the form of "microchip" tags implanted in cats and dogs. A community of researchers has emerged that employs RFID to track individual birds, mammals, fish, reptiles, and even insects in a wide range of field and laboratory research endeavors. For the majority of these projects, data collection, analysis, and curation are currently done by hand, which requires individual investigators to spend considerable time on data management rather than science. ETAG will transform the practices of its user community, by creating a common infrastructure based on open-source tools that will allow scientists to collect, validate, visualize, analyze, and share data and metadata in near real-time. As a result, researchers will have new capacities both for producing novel science and for sharing their work with their peers and the general public. The capacity to follow the activities of individual animals at feeding stations and nests is a powerful gateway to conversations about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). ETAG will provide new avenues for researchers to showcase their work and share it with the public through websites and social networking, featuring real-time updates from activities in the field.

The purpose of the ETAG project is to generate informatics infrastructure for RFID-based research, and to equip the emerging user community with resources that let them get the most from their data both in terms of generating new science and performing public outreach and education. ETAG will serve as a data upload portal, a professionally curated database, and a multifaceted dissemination portal for RFID data and will also facilitate the exchange of technical information about hardware, experimental approaches, protocols, and data analysis software produced by the user community. ETAG is part of a broader initiative that will make low-cost, highly versatile RFID equipment available to the scientific community. Already, more than 50 research groups in 19 countries have employed RFID systems designed by the ETAG team to carry out data collection in field and lab settings. Improved hardware and software resources will spur even wider adoption of RFID technologies by biologists and educators. With system support for real time data exchange, ETAG will allow these users to monitor their field or lab studies remotely and respond rapidly to emerging developments or problems. In addition, a common set of Internet-based tools will make it possible for teams of biologists and/or citizen scientists to undertake studies at a continental scale with concomitant data collection at networks of field sites. Finally, the software design documents and code will all be open source, allowing scientists to form alliances with a range of engineers, web designers, and IT specialists who will help add to and maintain the ETAG infrastructure. Progress and outcomes of the project can be tracked at http://etag.animalmigration.org.

NRT: Aeroecology as a Test-bed for Interdisciplinary STEM Training

The United States has built tremendous infrastructure for remotely measuring many aspects of the Earth's physical environment to provide benefits to society, such as satellites, radars, telescopes, and cameras. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has challenged the scientific community to expand the uses of this Earth observation infrastructure to generate new knowledge and provide additional societal benefits beyond those that were initially envisioned. This National Research Traineeship (NRT) award to the University of Oklahoma addresses this challenge by developing and testing a new model for training master's and doctoral students to use existing Earth observation data in new approaches to biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management. The traineeship program will implement and evaluate an interdisciplinary coursework program in Earth-observation for Science, Society, and Sustainability (EOS3) and an interdisciplinary research immersion program. This traineeship anticipates preparing one hundred and twenty (120) graduate students, including thirty (30) funded trainees, across three universities in the emerging discipline of aeroecology.

Aeroecology focuses on understanding the interactions of animals in the aerosphere (lower atmosphere). Aeroecology is emerging from the interface of biology, meteorology, geography, and computer science and has strong connections to social sciences both through environmental science and concerns about human health and safety. Engineering advances are transforming the aerosphere from a vast open space into a resource that we use for communication (cell phone towers), energy production (wind turbines), and transportation (aircraft and unmanned aerial systems). These mounting incursions into the aerosphere drive a need to understand and manage a new suite of human-biodiversity interactions and conflicts. This NRT project will build on unique strengths of the training consortium in aeroecology as a rapidly growing new use of Earth-observation data. The NRT will originate at the University of Oklahoma, replicate first at the University of Delaware, then at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and later radiate to additional consortium institutions across the nation. This NRT model will include training in communication, data analytics, team-based science skills, and entrepreneurship. Externship opportunities with private, government, and non-profit organizations will also help trainees gain professional skills in local, national, and international settings. Each participating institution will foster diversity through the implementation of best practices for inclusiveness in recruiting, retaining, and mentoring of graduate students. Rigorous evaluation of the impact of the NRT model on student learning, faculty development, and institutional change will inform future efforts to broadly improve interdisciplinary graduate education.

The NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program is designed to encourage the development and implementation of bold, new, potentially transformative, and scalable models for STEM graduate education training. The Traineeship Track is dedicated to effective training of STEM graduate students in high priority interdisciplinary research areas, through the comprehensive traineeship model that is innovative, evidence-based, and aligned with changing workforce and research needs.

An award is made to the University of Oklahoma to develop a highly adaptable, low-cost Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system for monitoring animals. RFID refers to a form of simple, short-distance wireless communication between small uniquely-identifiable transponder tags and an interrogator or reader. When a tag is attached to an animal, strategically placed readers can detect and record an animal's presence at key locations such as nests and food sources. The new RFID system is based on an existing design currently in use by dozens of researchers around the world that has enabled several new insights into the ecology and behavior of both free-living and lab animals. With improvements to this existing system, the research and development team will create a device that is highly customizable yet accessible to non-engineers. More specific improvements include capacity for wireless data transfer, accommodations for a wide array of additional sensors and actuators that can greatly expand the utility of the RFID system, and an online tool for designing customized antenna coils to meet specific user needs. The RFID system will be made available to users through multiple avenues, including online instructions, user-assembled reader kits, and fully constructed units, all of which will cost less than $50 per unit. With these low-cost self-assembly options, the RFID system will serve not only as a data collection tool for biologists but also as a vehicle for STEM education.

In the development of this instrument changes to the existing RFID hardware will include a more sophisticated microcontroller and a new RFID integrated circuit (to replace a device that has become obsolete). The firmware for the device will be rewritten and transferred from a proprietary language (Picbasic Pro) to Energia, which is a freely available open-source development environment based on the same framework used in many hobbyist electronic systems, like Arduino. Data output from the RFID reader will be configured for direct uploading into the ETAG database, which has been established by the development team with funding from the Advances in Biological Informatics program at NSF. The project will support several student-led projects that involve both testing the RFID system and creating accessory devices, such as electronic balances or infrared motion detectors, that can interface with the RFID system to provide additional data-collection capabilities. Ultimately, the new system will eliminate all barriers to the use of RFID technology in biological research. The sum total of the system improvements will give rise to an instrument that is affordable in the context virtually any serious research effort, customizable to an extent that allows for a wide range of field and lab deployment scenarios, accommodating to additional forms of data collection, and accessible to non-engineers such that biologists are able to establish systems themselves.

Each year in the Northern Hemisphere, birds, bats, and insects fly north in spring and south in autumn. These aerial migrations have fascinated people for millennia; however, given the difficulty of tracking animals flying through the open skies, little is known about the rules that govern life in the air. Human activities have local and global impacts on these migrations by eliminating stopover habitats where migrants rest and refuel during their hazardous journeys and by altering atmospheric conditions. This project asks whether aerial migrants can keep pace with these rapid changes and what traits make some migrants more adaptable to change than others. The collaborative team of biologists and meteorologists will develop and employ advanced animal tracking methods to reveal both the precise locations of birds during migratory flights and the atmospheric conditions they fly through. This tracking will include novel microsensors placed on birds and aerial vehicles to collect heretofore-elusive data streams that reveal the environment experienced by birds in flight. The research team will combine these new observations with weather radar data from across the U.S. that already captures massive quantities of data on migrating birds, bats, and insects as they fly over the countryside. This combination of new and existing data may yield novel insights into migrant behavior within their changing atmospheric habitats. By bringing together scientists across disciplines, this research will develop and test different ways to enhance communication, collaboration, and teamwork among the next generation of students and their teachers. Finally, this project will communicate to the public how the changing environment influences the timing of migration over and through their communities. Workshops in schools and community centers and work with local landowners will foster "citizen science" and adaptive strategies to contribute to this national effort.

To uncover scaling rules that control phenology of life in the air, this study implements a research framework that integrates the spatiotemporal rescaling hypothesis and the metabolic theory of ecology. From this basis the study predicts that seasonal phenology of aerial migration is accelerating in response to environmental changes and that small-bodied migrants should have a greater capacity to speed up migration than larger-bodied migrants. The project studies the central flyway of North America and focuses on the impact of the central plains low-level jet on aerial migration patterns. The low-level jet is a prominent feature of the North American atmosphere to which many aerial migrants are known to be highly adapted. Recent evidence that the low-level jet is both expanding in geographic scope and intensity provides an ideal context for testing the study's predictions. The project team will leverage existing open-access and newly collected data from two coincident aerial migration systems; nocturnal bird and insect migration. Sensors for tracking location and atmospheric conditions will be placed on migratory birds that span two orders of magnitude in body size. Integrated biological and meteorological data will be used to improve our understanding of the rescaling of the low-level jet and to test predictions about how that rescaling impacts the phenology of life in the air.

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.

The International Ornithological Congress (IOC) is arguably the world’s most important gathering of avian scientists. This conference occurs every four years, and it serves as a milestone within the discipline of ornithology. The next IOC will take place August 14-20, 2022 in Durban, South Africa. A key tradition at the IOC is supporting student participation and nurturing the next generation of scientists. This award will provide financial assistance for students in the United States to attend the IOC by helping them pay for travel and lodging associated with the meeting. Funds will also be used to encourage participation of groups that are underrepresented in science fields, including Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Native Pacific Islanders, people with disabilities, veterans, and first-generation college students. Moreover, the award selection committee will seek out students from institutions and research labs where funding for student travel is scant or unavailable. The 2022 IOC will not only expose students to cutting-edge research from all over the world, but will also provide key opportunities for personal and professional development. Conferences are where students learn the broader rules of conduct for their field, and they help students internalize their professional identities. Moreover, the IOC will provide many opportunities for students to showcase their research and contribute to the scientific record through live presentations, scientific posters, and video-recorded talks. Student participation in conferences like the IOC is critical for perpetuating a vibrant scientific community, and the 2022 IOC is poised to play a pivotal role in the careers of its student attendees.

Support for student travel to the 2022 International Ornithological Congress (IOC) will be administered by an international panel of experts who will review and rank all student applications. In addition to NSF funds, this panel will oversee distribution of contributions from other sources of student support; however, all NSF funds will be earmarked for US students. Students will apply for travel support as part of the registration process, and the selection committee will distribute funds in a manner that encourages participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields as well as students who may lack financial support from their labs or academic departments. Student attendees at the 2022 IOC will benefit from a scientific program that is rich in interdisciplinary research as well as several special events that promote student research and professional development. The scientific program is organized around 45 topical symposia as well as several open sessions for oral presentations. Students may contribute to symposia or open sessions, and they may also present posters and 5-minute ‘speed talks.’ As part of a new IOC format, all contributions to the scientific program will require submission of a pre-recorded video presentation. These videos will be compiled into digital proceedings that will be published online, complete with citation guidelines and digital object identifiers. Hence, among the many benefits to student participants at the 2022 IOC, there is a straightforward means to contribute to the scientific record. Although, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has warranted extreme caution in the planning of the 2022 IOC (as well as a backup plan to go online), the in-person scientific dialog afforded by attendance at the 2022 IOC will be a vital component in the education of young scientists.

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.