ABSTRACT

Biodiversity sustains ecosystems and human-life through natural services (e.g., insect diversity for pest control, pollinator diversity for food production). Despite its importance, our understanding of how biodiversity is generated and lost is still simplistic. For instance, we know that species interactions, changes in climate, and geologic events can change the rates at which new species evolve or go extinct. We also know that these drivers of speciation and extinction likely act in a combined manner, although that interaction has been rarely quantified due to the technical difficulty of doing so. This project combines genomic and ecological data with computational tool-development to understand how drivers interact to affect biodiversity. The knowledge acquired through this work is critical to managing biodiversity in a changing world. In addition to training the next generation of scientists, this project collaborates with 4-H summer camps (~2,500 campers/year) to teach principles of biodiversity to the general public and increase public appreciation of science. Importantly, the results of this project will assist with informed decision making to mitigate biodiversity loss and sustain human and natural system well-being.

One of the major limitations in the study of drivers of lineage diversification is the difficulty in quantifying the joint contributions of different sources of ecological opportunity. Although many studies have investigated how ecological opportunity can be created by changes in biogeographic, abiotic, and biotic environments, ecological opportunity often results from the interaction of various sources (e.g., dispersal to a new environment resulting in novel biotic interactions, abiotic niches and ecological release). Applying an integrated approach, this project develops methods to quantify the contributions and interactions of different sources of ecological opportunity and drivers of diversification. Specifically, the project develops and applies fully-parameterized, graphical, and likelihood-free methods to quantify the joint roles of potential drivers of diversification in the oil-rewarding plant genus Calceolaria and its oil-bee pollinators of genera Centris and Chalepogenus. This speciose group of plants and its specialized pollinators are characterized by repeated transitions across biotic, abiotic, and biogeographic gradients expected to interact to drive diversification. Their work demonstrates how interactions of different drivers can be quantified in a macroevolutionary framework, setting the foundations to advancing our ability to answer these central, but complex, eco-evolutionary questions across the tree of life.

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.

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