Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Habitat change and biodiversity loss threaten every ecosystem and natural process on earth. While considerable emphasis has been placed on measuring biodiversity, less focus has been placed on accurately and rapidly measuring how communities of species interact (e.g. parasites and hosts, animals and plants) and the structure of discrete but interacting communities across landscapes. As a consequence, quantifying and mitigating the effects of habitat alteration and identifying species at risk or resilient to environmental change is one of the foremost challenges in conservation biology. My objective is to establish how interactions among species (e.g. host-parasite relationships) and the environment shape community structure across multiple trophic levels (plants-animals-parasites-microbial life). My goal is to use these data to identify key traits which make species resilient to environmental changes and highlight those at most risk so that we can better prioritize conservation efforts and accurately model ecosystem changes. I propose to measure how plants, bats, their parasites and microbes interact with each other and the environment in fragmented Neotropical forest. This community provides vital seed dispersal functions and is responsible for much of the natural reforestation activity and movement of keystone species of plant critical to the restoration of this habitat. As such, understanding the factors which influence the persistence of these communities is essential to restoration ecology. We will use the latest in DNA technologies to determine: 1) Whether specific habitat characteristics (e.g. size and complexity of the forest) or individual species' traits (e.g. hardness of fruit and wing and skull morphology of bats) are most important in maintaining species within these habitats and thus promoting seed dispersal. 2) How habitat factors shape multi-trophic communities and the reciprocal influences of host-parasite interactions on the structure within and between communities across fragments. 3) Which environmental conditions and species' traits permit an individual who normally consumes fruit and disperses seeds to change behaviour to exploit insects as food or permits some insectivorous individuals to specialize on a subset of the available prey when under stress. Our research measures changes in biodiversity and species' interactions across multiple scales from individuals to landscapes and represents a truly novel and comprehensive approach to study complex multi-trophic level communities. This will lay the foundation for identifying traits which make a species resilient or at risk from changing environmental conditions and provide exciting training opportunities for students in how to apply the latest in genetic techniques to study cutting edge model systems.