Learning in a changing world: Maternal effects on offspring development and behaviour. The impact of anthropogenic change on Australia's biodiversity is of grave concern. It is therefore vital to understand the capacity of Australian fauna to adapt and change, despite environmental challenges. This project aims to quantify the potential for birds to respond to environmental challenges, by programming offspring with adaptive developmental profiles. By quantifying the effects of maternal stress ov ....Learning in a changing world: Maternal effects on offspring development and behaviour. The impact of anthropogenic change on Australia's biodiversity is of grave concern. It is therefore vital to understand the capacity of Australian fauna to adapt and change, despite environmental challenges. This project aims to quantify the potential for birds to respond to environmental challenges, by programming offspring with adaptive developmental profiles. By quantifying the effects of maternal stress over two generations, this project aims to determine whether mothers have the ability to alter rates of evolutionary change by employing epigenetic mechanisms. Combining lab trials with field data it will determine the biological relevance of these effects to a common, but declining bird, with relevance across Australian avifauna.Read moreRead less
Growing up with global change. This project aims to quantify how native bird populations will respond to global warming. The project will investigate how vulnerable nestling birds are to high temperatures, and the impact of early-life heat stress on adult performance and fitness in the wild. Although growing animals are most sensitive to heat, and stress during early-life often has irreversible negative effects, we know very little about long-term consequences of early-life heat stress. The inte ....Growing up with global change. This project aims to quantify how native bird populations will respond to global warming. The project will investigate how vulnerable nestling birds are to high temperatures, and the impact of early-life heat stress on adult performance and fitness in the wild. Although growing animals are most sensitive to heat, and stress during early-life often has irreversible negative effects, we know very little about long-term consequences of early-life heat stress. The intended outcomes will increase our capacity to predict impacts of climate warming before population declines become evident. Improved predictions are beneficial to identify urgent threats and optimise conservation efforts.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE190100660
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$409,805.00
Summary
Unravelling the impacts of global warming on whole ecological communities. This project aims to resolve how entire ecological communities respond to global warming and identify the mechanisms that underpin these responses. Combining manipulations of marine invertebrate communities with assays of energy use, the project expects to reveal emergent effects that cannot be predicted from responses of individual species. The expected outcome is a mechanistic understanding of how warming affects resour ....Unravelling the impacts of global warming on whole ecological communities. This project aims to resolve how entire ecological communities respond to global warming and identify the mechanisms that underpin these responses. Combining manipulations of marine invertebrate communities with assays of energy use, the project expects to reveal emergent effects that cannot be predicted from responses of individual species. The expected outcome is a mechanistic understanding of how warming affects resource use of entire communities that will increase our capacity to predict the consequences of climate change on food-web stability and productivity. These findings should reveal how species interactions alter energy use and invasion risk which is vital to manage ecosystems in a warmer world.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE140101611
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$379,040.00
Summary
Snow, shrub and climate feedbacks: impacts of shrub expansion in the Australian alpine zone. This project aims to understand the mechanisms promoting shrub expansion in alpine areas and the consequences of a shrub-dominated landscape in terms of shrubs as hydrological mediators and as biodiversity and ecosystem modifiers. Some shrub species trap wind-blown snow, thereby facilitating seedling survival through soil insulation and increases to meltwater. However, if adaptive and plastic responses t ....Snow, shrub and climate feedbacks: impacts of shrub expansion in the Australian alpine zone. This project aims to understand the mechanisms promoting shrub expansion in alpine areas and the consequences of a shrub-dominated landscape in terms of shrubs as hydrological mediators and as biodiversity and ecosystem modifiers. Some shrub species trap wind-blown snow, thereby facilitating seedling survival through soil insulation and increases to meltwater. However, if adaptive and plastic responses to climate change allows, shrub expansion will have significant negative impacts on alpine biodiversity and ecosystem function. This project will tease apart the interacting effects of snow, recruitment and adaptation to provide models of shrub increase and determine how shrubs modify alpine ecosystem processes and upper catchment hydrology.Read moreRead less
Predicting invertebrate life cycles under variable climates. This project seeks to characterise and predict the responses of invertebrates to climate variability and climate change. Alterations to the developmental trajectory are a major way that organisms adapt their life cycles to climatic variability. Many invertebrates avoid extremes of heat, cold and dry by entering a quiescent or diapause state, often at the egg stage. This project plans to apply novel high-throughput methods for character ....Predicting invertebrate life cycles under variable climates. This project seeks to characterise and predict the responses of invertebrates to climate variability and climate change. Alterations to the developmental trajectory are a major way that organisms adapt their life cycles to climatic variability. Many invertebrates avoid extremes of heat, cold and dry by entering a quiescent or diapause state, often at the egg stage. This project plans to apply novel high-throughput methods for characterising developmental patterns in the eggs of invertebrates in conjunction with microclimate models and modern phylogenetic methods to understand and predict responses to climatic variability. The methods are expected to be transferable to other invertebrates and may lead to breakthroughs in pest management and conservation.Read moreRead less
An integrated examination of the drivers of movements of large filter feeding organisms of high ecotourism value: a case study. This aim is to define key drivers behind movements of large filter-feeding organisms, using the manta ray as a model system. As dive eco-tourism often depends on the presence of such charismatic filter-feeding animals, an understanding of why animals occupy particular sites at particular times is important, especially in the face of climate change.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE170100601
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$372,000.00
Summary
Incorporating developmental plasticity into models of species distributions. This project aims to develop a generalizable framework for predicting effects of environmental variability on organisms’ developmental strategies, using anuran tadpoles as a test case. This framework will reveal how environmental variability influences geographic variation in developmental strategies, and provide tools to account for that variation in mechanistic models of species distributions. These tools are expected ....Incorporating developmental plasticity into models of species distributions. This project aims to develop a generalizable framework for predicting effects of environmental variability on organisms’ developmental strategies, using anuran tadpoles as a test case. This framework will reveal how environmental variability influences geographic variation in developmental strategies, and provide tools to account for that variation in mechanistic models of species distributions. These tools are expected to increase the capacity to predict extinction risk in changing environments, and be amenable to any taxon or environment, providing a solid foundation for understanding the evolution of life-history strategies in variable environments.Read moreRead less
Early-life climate sensitivity: direct and indirect mechanisms. This project aims to investigate how climate change threatens animal populations by determining the mechanisms causing DNA damage (short telomeres) in nestling birds growing up in hot conditions. Telomeres are biomarkers of individual life expectancy, and short telomeres in young birds predict a decline in future population viability. Our project aims to determine the importance for heat-induced telomere shortening of: (1) nestling ....Early-life climate sensitivity: direct and indirect mechanisms. This project aims to investigate how climate change threatens animal populations by determining the mechanisms causing DNA damage (short telomeres) in nestling birds growing up in hot conditions. Telomeres are biomarkers of individual life expectancy, and short telomeres in young birds predict a decline in future population viability. Our project aims to determine the importance for heat-induced telomere shortening of: (1) nestling heat stress responses; (2) inheritance of heat-shortened sperm telomeres; and (3) parental buffering of heat effects. Expected benefits include enhanced reliability of climate change predictions and improved ability to identify climate change mitigation strategies before population declines are evident.Read moreRead less
Eco-evolutionary consequences of evolutionary shifts in body size. This project aims to understand the biological consequences of evolutionary shifts in body size at three levels of biological organisation: individuals, populations, and communities. Human-mediated body size declines in natural animal populations are a new emerging threat to the function of ecosystems, but few studies have explored the consequences of such declines. This project will use the tractability of the study species to d ....Eco-evolutionary consequences of evolutionary shifts in body size. This project aims to understand the biological consequences of evolutionary shifts in body size at three levels of biological organisation: individuals, populations, and communities. Human-mediated body size declines in natural animal populations are a new emerging threat to the function of ecosystems, but few studies have explored the consequences of such declines. This project will use the tractability of the study species to discover how evolutionary shifts in body size alter biological processes. This project can expand understanding of the biological consequences of ongoing worldwide declines in body size in animals.Read moreRead less
Understanding and reversing the habitat shifts that have endangered the broad-headed snake. Extinction rates for vertebrate species are higher in southern Australia than almost anywhere else in the world, and saving endangered taxa is critical to biodiversity conservation. To do this effectively, researchers need to understand the processes that threaten wild populations, and to develop novel solutions to those problems in close collaboration with wildlife management authorities and other stake ....Understanding and reversing the habitat shifts that have endangered the broad-headed snake. Extinction rates for vertebrate species are higher in southern Australia than almost anywhere else in the world, and saving endangered taxa is critical to biodiversity conservation. To do this effectively, researchers need to understand the processes that threaten wild populations, and to develop novel solutions to those problems in close collaboration with wildlife management authorities and other stakeholders. This project will build such an understanding and collaboration, focusing on an endangered snake species. We propose ambitious landscape-scale field experiments that will simultaneously test hypotheses on threatening processes, and restore habitat quality to reverse population declines.Read moreRead less