Collaborative Proposal: MRA: The influence of climatic dipoles on plant and animal populations at continental scales

Changes in climate often result in the appearance of unusually warm and dry conditions in one part of the world with cold and wet conditions thousands of miles away. These lasting and predictable fluctuations in temperature and rainfall are known as "climatic dipoles" and often emerge across years or decades. A well-known example of this phenomenon is El Nino, where wet conditions across the southern United States are associated with dry conditions to the north. Most ecological studies collect data at local or regional scales. As a result, the continental-scale effects of climatic dipoles on ecological and environmental processes are largely unexplored. Climatic dipoles may provide insight on important phenomena such as animal migrations, agricultural and forest productivity, insect outbreaks, and the emergence of diseases. This study will use long-term observations of bird movements from thousands of citizen scientists, decades of seed production records in trees, and animal population numbers collected throughout the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). The project will partner with and guide existing citizen science programs to better predict the effects of climate on animals and plants. The team will organize "ecoclimatology" workshops to provide training to early-career scientists interested in both climate science as well as ecology. The research poses a novel framework of methods applied for space-time pattern discovery, used by climate scientists to analyze variability, to identify climate-ecological dipoles across North America. The overarching hypothesis is that many ecological phenomena are entrained at continental scales by dipole modes of climate variability. Specific questions include: 1) do atmospheric circulations and climatic dipoles synchronize seed production in trees (known as masting) and avian irruptions at continental scales?; 2) do unique modes of climate variability affect the population dynamics for multiple taxa (seed-dependent birds, small mammals, and ticks) at disjunct NEON sites and across multiple time lags?; and 3) how might historic and future environmental change influence these climatic-ecological relationships? Analyzing three decades of data from Project FeederWatch and a recently compiled data set of tree masting at hundreds of sites, the research will explore the use of empirical orthogonal functions to understand climate variability impacting plant and animal communities during a time of rapid environmental change. Ecological observatory networks, such as NEON, and citizen science databases are increasingly rich in information. Employing these analytical approaches from climate science will represent a key advance for ecological research. 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.