Jeffrey F. Kelly - US grants

0444610
Engel

This grant supports acquisition of a stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer (SIRMS) to conduct multi-element analyses of geological and biological materials at the University of Oklahoma (UO). A state-of-the-art SIRMS will replace an eighteen-year-old Finnigan Delta E that is limited to isotopic analysis of carbon and oxygen in samples prepared manually, off-line. The new instrument will include a dual inlet and continuous flow interfaces, high temperature pyrolysis system, H/D collector, and an automated sample preparation module. The new facility will allow for rapid, high volume analysis of isotopes of C, O, N, H and S in both organic and inorganic materials. The SIRMS facility will support faculty and student research on the Phanerozoic sulfur isotopic history of the oceans, studies of the migratory pattern and evolution of North American bird taxa from Pleistocene to Recent, and studies of the evolutionary dynamics of North American vegetative ecosystems.
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Measuring and describing patterns of individual and population movement is a fundamental aspect of understanding the physiology, behavior, ecology and life-history of any animal. Measuring movement also can provide the key to predicting species extinctions and invasions or the spread of disease. Yet, we have long been limited in our abilities to track animal movements over large distances and across time. Following individual animals has always proven challenging for human observers. Researchers must rely on technological innovations to expand our abilities to measure and describe movement. Recent rapid advances in molecular, chemical, electrical, and remote-sensing technologies are creating new tools for tracking individuals and whole populations and opening new frontiers for ecologists by allowing us to follow small, highly mobile animals like migratory songbirds in real-time across continents. The MIGRATE Research Coordination Network (RCN) will bring together researchers who are pioneering the development and application of emerging technologies for the purpose of investigating the amazing long-distance movements of migratory songbirds.
Long-distance landbird migration is an ideal system for applying new technologies in ways that advance both the technologies and our ability to describe movement strategies. To accelerate progress in these areas, the MIGRATE network will: (1) focus research techniques and questions on a small suite of model species that will advance understanding of ecological and evolutionary implications of long-distance movement; (2) foster cross-disciplinary collaborations among researchers throughout the Americas and Europe; (3) encourage standardized collection and sharing of tissues, technological advances, and data; and (4) create a platform for interdisciplinary training of students and the public. Additionally, by working at the nexus of emerging technologies (e.g., molecular, electrical, remote-sensing) and ecology, this network will provide allow currently active researchers to engage students from groups under-represented in the sciences in novel research projects.
Application of emerging intrinsic and extrinsic tracking technologies to novel problems in ecology will improve the technologies themselves. The rigorous research fostered by MIGRATE will increase our ability to identify population-level sources of DNA, stable isotope ratios, and trace elements. Advances in use of molecular markers will have applications across a broad range of disciplines such as identifying sources of bio-terrorism, commercial testing of ingredient purity, and locating origins of introduced exotic species. MIGRATE will allow students to access the newest developments, make field scientists aware of state-of-the-art technology advancements, and provide an interface between industry and field ecologist in diverse countries. In areas of health and economics, the results of MIGRATE can be applied to understanding and controlling the spread of disease through animal movement. Moreover, the ability to track individual migrant birds and identify populations will have immediate applications for conservation planning. A complete and integrated understanding of migration ecology will allow for more effective use of limited conservation resources and provide scientists with the ability to use migratory birds to monitor ecological responses to global climate change. This network will bring together a diverse set of approaches, facilitating communication among researchers on a multinational, inter-continental scale.

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).

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.

This award is to purchase an Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) with Laser Ablation and Liquid Chromatography capabilities. This ICP-MS system will measure the concentration of nearly all elements and their isotopes present in single mammalian cells, as well as complex liquid and solid samples. Research efforts will address core concerns of the south-central Plains region: healthcare technology, environment/population interactions, renewable energy, and water quality. This instrument will enable the collaborations among the University of Oklahoma (OU), Oklahoma State University (OSU) and the University of Tulsa (TU). Coordination with Oklahoma Tribal Nations will occur via research projects related to water quality issues pertinent to the Quapaw Tribal Environmental Office through the Tar Creek Superfund Site, and the Miami, Ottawa, Wyandotte, Shawnee, Eastern Shawnee, Modoc, Quapaw, Peoria and Seneca-Cayuga Nations through the Grand Lake Watershed Council. Oklahoma high school teachers will be engaged through the NSF-RET program "Rural Educators Engaged in Bioanalytical Engineering Research and Teaching" which targets rural students and teachers who are considered an underserved group in Oklahoma.

The ICP-MS instrument to be funded is a PerkinElmer NexION2000 ICP-MS with various analytical capabilities. Single mammalian cells will be analyzed by being introduced individually into the ICP-MS using an Asperon Spray Chamber. The ICP-MS will be located at the OU Mass Spectrometry Core Facility, Stephenson Life Science Research Center, Norman, OK. The specific research topics to be addressed are: 1) Interactions of nanomaterials and drugs with individual cells, as well as assessment of cellular-metal metabolic behavior; 2) Reconstruction of population dynamics, mobility, and connectivity of organisms in prehistoric and current ecosystems; 3) Enhancement of renewable energy material performance as well as improvement of hydrocarbon systems; and 4) Characterization of organism-metal interactions within dynamic ecosystems to protect human health and improve water quality. a

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.

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 lower atmosphere (i.e., aerosphere) is home to literally billions of organisms, including microbes, insects and birds. Species in the aerosphere often use other airborne organisms for food and are interdependent on one another. In recent decades, populations of many aerosphere organisms, such as birds and butterflies, have been rapidly declining in abundance. This project will examine the ecology of two bird and one bat species, all three of which feed on insects, and how their populations are responding in complicated ways to environmental change. These three species can also all be tracked when they emerge from their roosts by using state-of-the-art computer vision techniques with NEXRAD, the United States weather surveillance radar network. Project researchers will use the vast and ever-growing repository of data from the NEXRAD network to quantify the causes and consequences of ecological change in the aerial feeding and group habits of the two bird species (Purple Martins and Tree Swallows) and Mexican free-tailed Bats. The project will leverage environmental data from the NSF National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) together with the radar data to identify the drivers of changes in abundance, feeding, reproduction and other seasonal patterns. The massive data sets will be integrated with one another to develop predictions of how these three aerosphere species are changing at regional to continental scale, and in response to environmental changes. These studies will also incorporate training opportunities for a postdoctoral researcher and several graduate students and will include hosting an annual workshop on radar aeroecology for students and researchers (including members of underrepresented groups in science). Project investigators will work with a media team to produce a series of five video presentations on studying the ecology of birds, bats and insects in the aerosphere.

This project has two objectives: (1) understand how global environmental change has impacted seasonal timing and population abundance of aerial insectivores over the past twenty-five years and (2) determine drivers of recent within and between seasonal variation in timing and abundance. Aerial insectivore populations have shown precipitous declines in the last half century ? often at much steeper rates than other aerial taxa. Understanding mechanisms driving these changes would have broad implications for hundreds of species of birds, bats, and insects, and also serve as an indicator of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem health. However, the data sets needed to understand these mechanisms are currently lacking and urgently needed. While macroscale remote-sensing platforms for animals are rare, NEXRAD has emerged as a comprehensive source of information about flying animals, with large-scale and long-term (>two decades) coverage. The investigators will employ an interdisciplinary approach integrating radar remote sensing, data from NEON, and computer modelling to fill this vital gap and to test questions about population change, phenology, and trophic interactions in response to anthropogenic drivers of macroscale environmental change. The PIs will focus their project on the widespread roosting behaviors of three aerial insectivore species as bellwethers for environmental change and ecosystem health: Purple Martin, Tree Swallow, and Mexican free-tailed Bat. This collaborative and interdisciplinary approach will yield large-scale, quantitative, and predictive insights into changing environments. They will also generate new workflows, methodologies, and insights for the use of NEON data for the study of global change. Through this proposal the investigators will generate the tools and web interface to automatically identify, locate, and disseminate information regarding U.S.-wide roosting phenomena. The status of aerial insectivores is a representation of the seasonal pulse of ecosystem health ? the questions, infrastructural development, and outreach proposed will serve as for monitoring the status of aerial insectivores at the continental scale.

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.

Achieving national sustainability goals will require rapid adoption of more sustainable practices in many areas of society but transitions to sustainable practices are often slow. This project tests whether these transitions can be accelerated by (1) creating innovative ecological forecasts that predict where and when more sustainable practices would have the greatest benefits and (2) engaging impacted communities in the process of co-implementing forecasts and advocating for sustainability transitions. The study system is the proliferation of artificial lights at night (ALAN) and its impacts on migrant birds. ALAN is increasing rapidly worldwide, and its benefits are countered by pervasive negative consequences for biodiversity, ecosystems, and human health. A major ecological consequence of ALAN is disruption of bird migration – millions of birds die annually in collisions with well-lit buildings – which contributes to widespread bird population declines. The ALAN-bird migration system is ideal for this study because, like many wicked environmental problems, environmental concerns emerge as a product of complex social and cultural processes that have proven difficult to resolve using traditional approaches. This project employs a transdisciplinary convergence approach to integrating advances in ecological forecasting with those in the social and political science of community engaged scholarship. Experiments testing sustainability impacts of innovations in ecological forecasting will be co-designed and implemented with a coalition of convergence research partners. The project will generate an understanding of pathways by which sustainable practices are adopted for ALAN, this new knowledge can be used to help address other societal-environmental conflicts.

The project focuses on testing a key prediction of sustainability transformations science theory – that innovations originate within advocacy coalitions then accumulate at the subsystem level to drive sustainability transformations (e.g., new policies). During phase one the investigation gathers detailed national survey information on the ALAN system and creates transformational technological improvements in existing bird migration forecasts specific to impacts of ALAN. This new social and ecological knowledge will then be used to engage with advocacy coalitions in specific urban testbed sites to co-implement sustainability transformation experiments during phase two. These experiments will use targeted messaging campaigns to foster ALAN mitigation. Experiments will be focused on sustainability-oriented coalitions because these advocates are predicted to have high leverage to affect radical transformation toward sustainability across the ALAN subsystem. Impacts of the experiments on ALAN, impacts of ALAN on migrant birds, and human behaviors and attitudes toward ALAN will be quantified. Through this two-phase approach this project will produce a new understanding of how innovations derived from a convergence research approach can be employed in a sustainability science and policy framework to accelerate transformations. These outcomes will contribute understanding of how communities and researchers can co-engage with wicked environmental problems more broadly to drive transformations toward sustainability. Results will create new, and potentially transformative, understanding of how ecological forecasting contributes to sustainability transformations. This project is jointly funded by the Growing Convergence Research Program and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

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.