(828) 526-0173 | [email protected] | Copyright 2024 – All Rights Reserved.
Fostering a Research Corps
Written By: Sonya Carpenter - Highlands Biological Foundation | Issue: 2016/11 - November
For over 50 years, the Highlands Biological Foundation has provided grants in support of scientific research, bringing graduate students and research scientists to Highlands from all over the country and the world.
Vetted by our Board of Scientific Advisors, these grants make it possible for researchers to conduct their research in residence at the Highlands Biological Station, fostering an active research corps each summer that benefits all Station users. Our Grant-in-Aid program is a model of success, yielding hundreds of graduate theses and thousands of scientific papers over the years.
This summer, a few of our Grant-in-Aid recipients focused on how various species are responding to climate change.
One researcher, Eric Riddell, has been investigating how salamanders are dealing with these changes. Current projections suggest that climate change will reduce the majority of suitable habitats for salamanders in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, the salamander capital of the world. However, these predictions do not account for biological processes, such as the ability to adapt to a new climate, which is expected to lessen the ecological impacts of climate change. Eric has been studying the potential for salamanders to acclimate to their environment by rapidly adjusting physiological and behavioral traits. By incorporating acclimation, he hopes to provide more realistic projections on the potential ecological impacts of a warming world.
Over the summer, Eric measured the body temperatures of salamanders in the field to improve models that predict the influence of climate change. Body temperatures are perhaps the most important component of these models because they estimate how much energy a salamander gains and loses at any particular time and location. The amount of energy gained can determine if salamanders have enough energy to produce offspring in a specific geographic location. Upon incorporating his findings into advanced ecological models, his research suggested that salamanders can maintain energy budgets that are capable of producing offspring under future climate change. Therefore, the physiology and behavior of animals might play a critical role in determining the risk of extinction in changing environments.
For more information regarding the research conducted at HBS, visit our website at highlandsbiological.org.
