Joint Species And Niche Evolution

Descripción del proyecto

Comprensión de la evolución de la biodiversidad

El concepto de ritmo y modo de diversificación de las especies integra la paleontología con la genética y la selección natural, y representa una cuestión fundamental para la biología evolutiva. Los linajes se diversifican durante la evolución de los clados (agrupaciones con un ancestro común) de forma que la disparidad en los nichos aumenta cuando los nuevos linajes colonizan vacíos de espacios de nichos. Sin embargo, a pesar de su importancia, todavía no se comprende la interdependencia entre la diversificación de las especies y la evolución de los nichos. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos INSANE tiene como objetivo desarrollar unos modelos flexibles e innovadores que permitan sacar conclusiones conjuntas sobre diversificación combinada y dinámica de evolución de rasgos. Extenderá la investigación a la evolución de rasgos con múltiples variables, describirá mejor el concepto de nicho e integrará datos paleontológicos. El proyecto mejorará nuestra comprensión sobre la creación y la evolución de la biodiversidad.

Objetivo

Understanding the tempo and mode of species diversification and concomitant ecological divergence has been a long-sought goal in evolutionary biology. As clades diversify, disparity in niches typically increases when new lineages colonize previously unfilled zones of niche space. Despite its critical importance in understanding life’s evolution, the universality of an interdependence between species diversification and niche evolution, as well as the directionality and drivers of this association, are still poorly understood. This is presumably attributable to the inherent computational and mathematical challenges to develop process-generating models that would couple diversification and niche evolutionary dynamics and the limited availability of extensive and comparable datasets to characterize niches over large radiations integrating neontological and paleontological data. In this project, I will first develop much-needed novel flexible models that allow joint inference on coupled diversification and trait evolution dynamics by allowing joint rate-heterogeneity for radiations of considerable size. Subsequently, I will enhance biological realism by expanding to multivariate evolution of traits, better characterizing the niche concept, and by integrating paleontological data. Finally, I will allow inference on biotic and abiotic drivers of the interrelationship of species and niche diversification. These models will enable examining hitherto untestable classic evolutionary hypotheses in a formal framework on the feedback between diversification and niche evolution, at the intersection of ecology and evolutionary biology. By applying these models to big scale curated datasets of species-level niches and recently available phylogenetic trees for thousands of species and the ability to integrate fossil information, I will substantially increase our understanding on how biodiversity, both in terms of richness and niches, is generated.