Project Grant 2224891

This $337,359 National Science Foundation project grant to The University of Toledo will fund research into the impact of climate change on functional biodiversity in Lake Tanganyika, Africa. The research will study Lake Tanganyika's sedimentary record to track changes in open water and benthic community structures and functions under different climate change scenarios using geochemical, fossil, and genomic tools. It will assess the physical and physiological responses of key organisms to environmental changes and identify shared and divergent responses across the lake's fauna. The results aim to predict biodiversity changes in large tropical lakes amid climatic uncertainty. This work aligns with the Biological Sciences program's goals of increasing biological science knowledge and understanding major national problems like food security and biodiversity loss related to climate change impacts. The five-year project period begins October 15, 2022.