The National Science Foundation recently announced a $20 million grant to a multi-institutional research project called “The Missouri Transect: Climate, Plants and Community.”
The project will look at how climate variability affects plants, animals and communities in Missouri.
“What we’re interested in scientifically is how does climate variability impact both agriculture and native ecosystems and also how climate variability impacts the human communities across (Missouri),” said John Walker, Curators’ Professor of Biological Sciences, director of the Division of Biological Sciences and principal investigator for the grant.
This project will feature four teams of researchers, each focused in areas of climate, plants, community and education.
“(The climate team) is interested in collecting climate data both regionally and locally at a very high resolution,” Walker said. “(The team) will use this information to generate models to predict climate variability across regions and locales, so there’s both data collection and model predictions.”
The climate team will be the key to starting the project, Walker said, as the other teams will use the data on climate variability and water availability in their studies.
Once the climate team has analyzed their information, the plant team will use the data to see how different plants react to climate variability. The plant team will use both modern technology and genomic approaches in their experiments to see plant reactions.
“(The plant team) is going to integrate climate data and water availability with how well plants grow essentially under those different climatic conditions,” Walker said. “We’re going to try to associate the genes and genetics of different plants with their ability to survive and adapt to climate variability.”
While the plant team is conducting its experiments, the community team will look at how climate variability universally affects different Missouri communities, both rural and urban.
Walker said the team hopes to discover how communities deal with climate variability, and what policies can be developed to deal with climate variability in the future.
“If there is excess heat, drought or flooding, (the team will see) how that community deals with that situation,” he said. “(They will also see) if there are policies that can be developed and put in place so they can deal with climate variability in a better way. (The community team) will take information from the climate team to inform communities about how they might able to adapt to climate variability.”
On the other hand, the education team will focus on workforce development rather than conducting experiments.
“We will be training folks at various levels from K-12, developing teaching modules to inform them about the project,” Walker said. “Then we will go from undergraduate to graduate students to post-graduates to researchers.”
Researchers from institutions across Missouri — including all four UM System campuses, Washington University, St. Louis University, Lincoln University, the Donald Danforth Plant Sciences Center and the St. Louis Science Center — will join the project.
Hank Foley, senior vice chancellor for research and graduate studies at MU, said in a news release that the collaborative research could benefit Missouri’s research infrastructure.
“The collaboration among institutions as well as scientific disciplines will help drive the state’s research infrastructure and competitiveness,” Foley said in the release. “It also will provide opportunities to move research from the lab to the marketplace and thus spur innovation and entrepreneurship.”