BII-Implementation: The causes and consequences of plant biodiversity across scales in a rapidly changing world

This Biology Integration Institute will use the tools of remote sensing and spectral biology to develop new techniques for measuring individual plants and landscape vegetation so as to understand the causes and consequences of biodiversity change. Biodiversity loss and climate change are major global crises that threaten humanity's life support systems and its ability to cope with major challenges. It has never been more important for us to bring together our knowledge of life's diversity from cells to continents to better understand the causes and consequences of its change for the biological processes that impact our well-being. As the biological sciences have become increasingly fragmented, new ways to integrate biological processes across scales are needed to understand the basis of Earth's life support systems. Spectral biology takes advantage of the way that energy interacts with matter to reveal immense amounts of information about the chemistry, structure, function, and evolution of plants. The project harnesses the technology and platforms now available, such as the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON)—and those emerging even at the global scale with forthcoming satellites—to quantify building blocks of life at every biological scale using the same currency: photons from the sun that are reflected by plants. While doing so, the Institute will train the next generation of diverse and integrative biologists, including the mentoring of young scientists from marginalized groups. It will focus on engaging Native American communities, K-12 teacher training, and public outreach through Market Science modules, Minute Earth videos, a museum exhibit and public engagement and educational activities through the Bell Museum of Natural History, the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve (CCESR), and the Wisconsin Tribal Conservation Association.

The Institute will investigate the causes and consequences of plant biodiversity across scales in a rapidly changing world, from genes and molecules within cells and tissues to communities, ecosystems, landscapes and the biosphere. The Institute focuses on plant biodiversity, defined broadly to encompass the heterogeneity within life that occurs from the smallest to the largest biological scales. A premise of the Institute is that life is envisioned as occurring at different scales nested within several contrasting conceptions of biological hierarchies, defined by the separate but related fields of physiology, evolutionary biology, and ecology. The Institute will emphasize the use of spectral biology and process-oriented predictive models to investigate the ways that biological components at one scale give rise to emergent properties at higher scales by addressing five themes:

Theme 1. The genetic and environmental (i.e., GxE) drivers of trait variation at the leaf and whole plant scale linked by transcriptomic, metabolic and morphological variation;

Theme 2. How evolution generates the functional and spectral variation across the tree of life and its utility for biodiversity detection;

Theme 3. How functionally and spectrally distinct taxa, sampled across the tree of life, interact locally, leading to the assembly and dynamics of communities at multiple spatial scales, under current and future environmental conditions;

Theme 4. The consequences of biodiversity for ecosystem functioning and its response to global change;

Theme 5. How to improve parameterization of tissue- to ecosystem-scale properties at various spatial scales and advance land surface models that incorporate plant functional diversity.

The Institute will integrate biology in new ways by harnessing the potential of spectral biology, experiments, observations, and synthetic modeling in a manner never before possible to transform understanding of how variation within and among biological scales drives plant and ecosystem responses to global change over diurnal, seasonal, and millennial time scales. In doing so, the institute will use and advance state-of-the-art theory.

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.