Collaborative Research: OPUS: Synthesizing long-term data to understand the ecological and evolutionary consequences of hurricanes

Hurricanes can have devastating impacts on coastal areas. This research will evaluate the ecological and evolutionary effects of hurricanes on island ecosystems. Climate change caused by humans has increased the strength and frequency of hurricanes in the North Atlantic over the past 20 years. Using decades of data on the lizards, spiders, insects, and plants living on islands in a hurricane-prone region, this project will determine how storm intensity is related to natural selection, extinction risk, and species interactions. This research seeks to establish a better understanding of the ecological and evolutionary consequences of climate-change driven increases in the frequency and magnitude of hurricanes. A better understanding of the biological impacts of extreme weather events on ecosystems will increase the accuracy of predictions needed to protect and manage biodiversity. The publications and synthesized data sets from this project will be useful to a broad range of stakeholders, including basic and applied scientists, resource managers, and policy makers. This research will capitalize on decades of annual measurements of trait variation in a lizard, spider community composition, and food-web interactions across three trophic levels from dozens of small islands in the Bahamas. During this time, 17 hurricanes and tropical storms passed close to the study site, generating variation in hurricane impacts across time and space. This retrospective analysis will integrate long-term biological data with meteorological models that generate island-specific estimates of wind speed, storm surge, and wave energy during storms. Tests of synthetic hypotheses aim to 1) reveal thresholds for natural selection and extinction risk for lizards related to variation in hurricane intensity, 2) determine recovery trajectories for spider communities related to the interactive effects of hurricane intensity, dispersal, and species interactions, and 3) elucidate the roles of top-down and bottom-up pathways in hurricane-driven increases in herbivory. The simultaneous consideration of many storms and the integration of detailed estimates of hurricane-specific damage adds substantial value to long-term data on lizards, spiders, herbivores, and plants in these island ecosystems. The analytical approach will serve as an example for integrating biological and meteorological data sets to address the effects of other increasingly common and strong extreme weather events. 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.