PEET: Monographic and Phylogenetic Research on Leafhoppers and Treehoppers (Insecta: Hemiptera: Membracoidea)

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9978026Dietrich and Deitz This Partnership for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy (PEET) award supports a team approach to taxonomic monography, student training, and databasing directed toward the Membracoidea group of insects, with about 25,000 published species names and estimates up to 250,000 of the actual number of species worldwide. These are the leafhoppers and treehoppers, insects with piercing and sucking mouthparts that feed on plant sap; many of these are pests in agricultural and agro-forestry systems or serve as vectors of plant disease. Despite their great diversity and ecological significance, the taxonomy, classification, and understanding of phylogenetic relationships in this large group of insects are in need of study, and the number of trained specialists is small. This PEET project addresses that need with a program of research and training, including morphological and molecular (DNA sequencing) methods, field expeditions to collect new material, study of existing museum collections, and databasing of information on the taxonomy, phylogeny, geographic distribution, and host affiliations of these insects. The team is led by Christopher Dietrich of the Illinois Natural History Survey and Lewis Deitz of North Carolina State University and includes colleagues at the USDA-Smithsonian (Stuart McKamey) and elsewhere. Pioneering work on the molecular phylogenetics of membracoid insects by the investigators has helped delimit lineages which can serve as challenging but manageable thesis topics for graduate students' research in modern taxonomic monography. Study of extensive museum holdings will be supplemented with field expeditions to regions in Southeast Asia and in Mexico and Central America, where the diversity is poorly represented in existing collections. Morphological and molecular characters will be integrated as part of monographic and revisionary analyses, with attention to synthesizing information from the older literature and resolving nomenclatural problems at species, genus, and family ranks. An extensive program of databasing builds upon computer resources and digital-library expertise at North Carolina State University, which will include an ambitious web-searchable inventory of taxonomic literature on membracoid insects numbering in the thousands of documents.