HMEI Biodiversity Challenge awards over $900,000 to projects exploring the challenges and pressures on the planet’s biodiversity

The High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI) has awarded five Princeton University researchers and their collaborators nearly one million dollars in inaugural funds from the Thomas A. and Currie C. Barron Family Biodiversity Research Challenge Fund, also known as the Biodiversity Challenge. These funds help underwrite cutting-edge research projects intended to investigate the effects of environmental change, such as climate change, on the Earth’s biodiversity, while exploring what can be done to stem the loss of biodiversity by directly addressing barriers to conservation.

Each research project has a duration of two years and includes the participation of faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students from ten University academic units. Each project is also designed to provide hands-on summer research opportunities for undergraduate students through HMEI’s Environmental Internship Program.

The Biodiversity Challenge is one of six programs that, collectively, are part of the Grand Challenges program at Princeton. The Grand Challenges programs integrate research and teaching that catalyzes and inspires multi-disciplinary projects aimed at tackling major environmental challenges for the 21st century. The Biodiversity Challenge, in particular, builds on the University’s decade long leadership in studying how biodiversity arises, how it is maintained, and how to sustain it in the face of growing demands for natural resources, among other challenges. It is the newest research cooperative to be added as part of HMEI’s Grand Challenges program and was established in 2020 through a gift to Princeton from Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron.

The five projects that have received funding this year include research intended to investigate how: (1) plant breeding can be used to increase agro-biodiversity and crop climate resilience; (2) biodiversity loss from hypoxia affects coral reef ecosystems; (3) animal-informed planning and design in suburban and built environments can lessen biodiversity loss; (4) indigenous Amazonian ecological knowledge and practices can promote biodiversity and ecosystem conservation; and (5) fluid transport occurs in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), which are crucial to agriculture, biodiversity, and understanding ecological changes that may accompany climate change.

The following are brief descriptions of the awarded projects. These were funded as the result of a campus-wide call for proposals announced earlier this year.

Plant Breeding to Increase Agro-Biodiversity and Crop Climate Resilience

Jonathan Conway, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, leads this project to grow and analyze two commercially important crops, okra and collard greens. He is assisted by Tessa Desmond, a research specialist in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. The goal is to develop improved strands of these plant populations for sustainable and climate resistant agriculture. The focus on okra, specifically, seeks to develop a variety that has a high seed oil content—more than 30 percent—to make growing okra as a commodity crop more economically feasible for farmers looking for alternatives to high-input crops. Researchers are also collaborating with two community organizations, the Utopian Seed Project of North Carolina, which is assisting with the high-oil-content breeding, and the Heirloom Collard Project, which is developing a regionally adapted variety of collard greens and assessing root microbiome diversity in field sites.

The project supports research opportunities for four Princeton undergraduates. The researchers engage in plant breeding work, investigate questions about the plant microbiome’s role in crop resilience, and train undergraduate students in observation of biodiversity, plant breeding, lab research, and sustainable agriculture.

Assessing Biodiversity Loss from Hypoxia in Coral Reef Ecosystems

Curtis Deutsch, professor of geosciences and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, leads this project to investigate and assess the risks and costs of hypoxia-driven biodiversity loss in tropical reef ecosystems. This work builds on research previously conducted collaboratively between Deutsch and Noelle Lucey, a marine biologist and currently a postdoctoral researcher at HMEI. Hypoxia, low O2, plays a critical role in shaping the diversity of reef ecosystems, but the threat from human amplification of hypoxia on reefs remains poorly understood. Deutsch and his research team combine research on biodiversity, climate change, and coastal development with actionable strategies for tropical communities most at risk from hypoxia-driven coral biodiversity loss.

Undergraduate students will participate in a two-week class at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Bocas Research Station (BRS) in Panama, where they will learn, through a combination of lectures, labs, and land- and sea-based field trips, about how research can lead to tangible solutions that can help to mitigate biodiversity loss in the tropics. Two undergraduates will also have the opportunity to work on related projects with summer HMEI internships.

Building for Biodiversity: Animal-informed Planning and Design

Sigrid Adriaenssens, professor of civil and environmental engineering, is exploring how biodiversity and habitat loss in urban and built environments, though an increasingly critical problem, can be mitigated through animal-informed planning, a planning and engineering methodology in urban and suburban spaces that takes into account biodiversity as a guiding ethic in development and design, and where human and non‐human animals can co‐exist. The goal of this project is to present the first animal‐informed urban planning and infrastructure design methodology that generates and enhances bio‐diverse habitats and passages based on circular economy principles. The researchers use the Princeton University campus and its surroundings, which are home to a diversity of animal species, as a microcosm to study how design can impact biodiversity. This project identifies mammal species that indicate broader biodiversity, research and test animal‐informed suburban planning and infrastructure design, document their use, and raise public awareness of the enhanced campus biodiversity.

The project includes an undergraduate and graduate course during the academic year. The first, titled “Visible Wild,” is taught by Jeffrey Whetstone, professor of visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts; the second course, “Topics in the Formal Analysis of the Urban Structure,” is taught by Mario Gandelsonas, the Class of 1913 Lecturer in Architecture, and professor of architecture. Additional student tie-ins include HMEI summer internships, senior thesis generation, and an opening for four graduate students and one postdoctoral researcher to gain experience in urban planning research and related topics.

Indigenizing Biodiversity Conservation: A Collaborative Inquiry on the Ways Amazonian Indigenous Ecological Knowledges and Practices Promote Biodiversity and Ecosystem Conservation

João Biehl, Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Brazil LAB at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, explores and showcases the myriad ways Indigenous Peoples are safeguarding many of the world’s diverse array of ecosystems. The researchers focus on the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon—the planet’s largest tropical forest— and develops new collaborative methodologies that put Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge systems into critical and integrative dialogue. Specifically, the researchers are designing frameworks that creatively combine ancestral Indigenous knowledges and practices concerned with biodiversity and ecosystem conservation with cutting-edge understandings of social-ecological systems that emanate from the social and natural sciences. Some of these practices include, for example, techniques for managing multispecies interactions and soil enrichment. The overall goal is to demonstrate how Indigenous ecological knowledges and practices can inform nature-based sustainability initiatives.

The project will provide summer research opportunities for two undergraduates in Brazil. The researchers will also offer a freshman seminar, “Planet Amazonia,” that will include a three-week module, Indigenizing Biodiversity Conservation, to introduce students to indigenous ecological knowledge. During the second year, a new Anthropology course will be offered that will be dedicated solely to indigenous ecological knowledge and practices.

Addressing the Puzzle of Time-Varying, Bidirectional Flows in Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi Networks

Howard Stone, the Donald R. Dixon ’69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department, investigates how arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are part of a symbiotic relationship responsible for significant fluid transport networks below ground. These networks, in turn, provide nutrients that make plant life possible. The fluid dynamics of AMF are distinct from other plant networks but remain poorly understand, though recent research has highlighted previously unknown time varying, bidirectional hyphal (threads that make up the mycelium of a fungus) fluid flows characteristic of the AMF transport network. This research raises many new questions important to the ecology, development, and environmental responsiveness of AMF and their central role in life in soils. The project plans to develop the first models of internal fluid flows of hyphal networks, and the bidirectional transport that they enable.

The project will offer undergraduate students the opportunity to write senior theses on the research topic with special emphases on science, sustainability, and biodiversity themes informed and motivated by the impact of mycorrhizal fungi on underground transport processes and physical chemistry. Professor Stone will also provide independent work for undergraduates and summer research experiences through the HMEI internship program.