2024 Ranges Imaging Mini-Award Winners
2024 Recipients
| Recipient | Institution | Project Title |
|---|---|---|
| Leila Siciliano-Martina | Texas State University | Trait morphology and habitat specializations in kangaroo rat species (Genus Dipodomys) |
| Chris Law | University of Washington | Interspecific and intraspecific variation in the skulls of three British Columbia weasels |
| Sydney Decker | Ohio State University | Skull Morphology Variation Across Environmental Conditions in Widely Distributed Yellow Bats |
| José Garbriel Martinez-Fonseca | Northern Arizona University | Assessing phenotypic differences within and between Zapus species in the western United States |
| Priscila de Souza Rothier Duarte | Cornell University | MiniMMorph: Evolutionary and temporal variation of Miniaturized Mammalian Morphologies |
| Brian Tanis | Oregon State University | Spatial and temporal variation of bite force in camas pocket gophers (Thomomys bulbivorus) |
2024 Webinar
The Ranges Network presents The importance of 3D imaging in current trait-based mammal research: Winners of the Ranges Imaging Mini-Awards. This webinar was presented on November 7th, 2024, as a part of the iDigBio TCN Webinar series.
Video
Visit iDigBio’s YouTube page to view in full-screen or larger size.
Abstract
Recipients of the 2024 Ranges Imaging Mini-Awards will present their research and how 3D imaging has helped to advance their work. The Ranges Imagining Mini-Awards (RIMA) are presented and facilitated by the Ranges Network (NSF DBI-2228385) as a part of a four-year effort to digitize mammal traits from western North America. RIMA was created to encourage digitization, outreach and to support the trait-based research of advanced students and early-career professionals in need of high-quality 3D imagery.
RIMA enables researchers to produce new images of mammal specimens from biocollections to extend their current research by collecting internal and potentially complex trait data at the intraspecific level that can be integrated with other specimen-level data digitized by Ranges, such as reproduction, habitat, geography or time. Recipient projects focus on various aspects of morphological variation. This webinar features four of the six 2024 RIMA winners. Each will present their research and how 3D imaging has helped to advance their work.
Ranges seeks to digitize traits from over one million mammal specimens from 19 natural history museums, with a focus on western North America.
Slide Decks
All slides are in PDF format. Any animations or videos will not display as intended in the original slides. Please contact the Ranges Project Manager to request slides in their original format.
Webinar Q&A
At the end of the webinar the presenters answered several questions. Those questions not answered during the recording are provided below.
| Question | Answer | Answer provided by |
|---|---|---|
| Great talk Sydney! What’s the most interesting question you think you will be able to answer with the 3D skull shape data? | I am particularly excited to explore if we can detect covariation of skull morphology and environmental variables that would be expected if the bats are adapting to local conditions | Sydney Decker |
| In the last slide [of Sydney’s] with the animation, the brain is “leaking” through the cranium. Is that real or artifact? How do you control for artifacts in landmarks in 3D data? | This is an artifact of reconstructing the surface model due to extreme differences in the bone thickness and density across the bat skulls. There are several thin spots in the crania with low intensity values in the CT data while teeth give off very high intensity values. A similar phenomenon could be seen in the scapula of Jose’s 3D model. This is primarily an issue for the approach taken to create the figures, but we are working to address this in our automated processing pipelines. | Sydney Decker |
| Question for José: I assume that the images be stored in collection-specific databases, but where will the extracted color value data be stored? Is that something that could be housed associated with images in MorphoSource? Might be nice to do that instead of some collection-agnostic repository like Dryad. | In general, yes, we would like to publish all the data. It might be logistically hard to publish the color data independently to each specimen. Each museum would need to add that for each specimen. The other thing is that there are many ways/software to extract the color data from images, so not sure if extracted color data will be as useful as the images themselves that are already available on each specimens’ account on Arctos. | José Gabriel Martinez-Fonseca (via email) |
| Question for Priscilla: how common is seasonal variation in brain size and limb bone density across mammals? that’s bonkers. Any evidence for this in the fossil record? | Hi Dave! Brain srinking has been only observed in the common shrew, although brain case srinking exists even in weasels, moles, and other shrews. The mineralization variation in the postcranial has been mostly reported for rodents/ I’m not aware about studies looking at that in the fossil record, but should be promising! | Prsicila de Souza Rothier Duarte |
| For the shrews, it seems energetically costly to regrow material post-winter. Is there an explanation for why this is benefiical or waht tradeoffs exist? | That’s true, and the mechanisms are not well understood. for winter, srinking might be benefitial for taking energy, and reducing metabolism. but at the same time, during summer when animals find partners, reduced brains are not advantagous in terms of cognitive capabilities. so regrowing can be benefitial to exploring the environment. | Prsicila de Souza Rothier Duarte |
| For Brian: do you see any temporal trends in morphology among your samples from the 1910s to the 2000s? | There is a bit of a trend for increased skull length over that span, but we don’t have a lot of power yet because we have to account for sexual dimorphism in skull length too. | Brian Tanis |