Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
Content archived on 2024-06-18

Integrative taxonomy and the origin of species

Objective

Morphological, behavioural and molecular characters are of interest in evolutionary biology because they evidence lineage divergence and are contingent properties of species. With the incorporation of molecular biology into taxonomy, taxonomists realized that species diversity could not be completely deciphered using morphology alone. Nonetheless, the incorporation of multiple biological properties into taxonomic practice has been controversial. This proposal aims to test how the combined use of different suites of characters may converge toward more stable taxonomies, less likely to be affected by the discovery of new taxa or by the advance on the knowledge. Stable taxonomies would obviously benefit other scientists and society. To explore this, we test to which extent do species described on qualitative morphological coincide with the results of DNA barcoding analyses, and divergences in prezygotic reproductive barriers. We further aim to analyze how characters evolve during the process of speciation to provide a better basis for the selection of character when describing and naming species. This research will be performed at the Department of Evolutionary Biology of the Evolutionary Biology Centre at Uppsala University, under the supervision of Dr. Carles Vilà. His expertise in the use of molecular genetics approaches for the study of organismal and molecular evolution will perfectly complement the expertise of the applicant. During his PhD research the applicant has acquired an extensive experience on taxonomy (morphology) and bioacoustics (analyses of reproductive barriers through mating calls) analyses of amphibians and reptiles. Hence, the applicant could obtain solid formation on molecular techniques and concepts while transferring his taxonomic knowledge to molecular biologists. The combination of these different areas of expertise will allow the development of truly integrative approaches to taxonomy.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Call for proposal

FP7-PEOPLE-2007-2-1-IEF
See other projects for this call

Coordinator

UPPSALA UNIVERSITET
EU contribution
€ 170 697,32
Address
VON KRAEMERS ALLE 4
751 05 Uppsala
Sweden

See on map

Region
Östra Sverige Östra Mellansverige Uppsala län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data
My booklet 0 0