Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Climate change and globalization pose grave threats to biodiversity, exposing species to rapidly fluctuating environments ranging from altered thermal regimes, competition with invasive species, and exposure to pathogens to which they are naïve. Species differ in their inherent capacity to adapt to these pressures, where long-lived species with low genetic diversity are presumed constrained in their ability to adapt on timescales reflective of current environmental change. Recent investigations suggest additional mechanisms exist for rapid adaptation that include the differential use of existing genomic variation and the increasingly recognized role of gut bacteria in interfacing with changing environments (enhancing heat tolerance, allowing for altered diets, and providing pathogen resistance). Genomic and computational tools provide ever-growing insight into these mechanisms and their interactions in natural populations, data that can refine forecasts of species persistence in context of ongoing climate change. My research will primarily focus on species of conservation concern, bison and muskox, that are of economic, nutritional and cultural significance to Inuit and northern Indigenous communities. These species include Arctic and sub-Arctic distributions where warmer and wetter climates lead to vulnerabilities from heat stress, altered forage availability, and northward expansions of disease. Being ruminants, gut microbiomes have important impacts on the fitness of these species in terms of their ability to derive nutrients from changing arrays of plants and combat invasive pathogens. Bison and muskox also include subspecies occupying more northern and southern latitudes, respectively. It is unclear if southern subspecies have variation relevant to the capacity for these species to persist and what biodiversity will be lost if northern subspecies become less adapted to their environments. My research will determine how these species adapt to their current environments, assess their capacity to adapt to novel pressures on the landscape, and forecast population persistence under models of environmental change. Active management from these data could help mitigate negative impacts from climate change, conserve biodiversity, and maintain ecosystem health.