Biodiversity and host specificity of chrysomelid beetles in a tropical montane rainforest ecosystem

如“ABA厄瓜多尔”小组的介绍性文字所述，该项目有助于开发加快生物多样性编目和在复杂生态系统中重新鉴定物种的工作流程。我们将专注于一个物种丰富的草食性甲虫群，金龟科，并为此目的结合两个不同工作组的专业知识，一个用于这些甲虫的分类和生物学（第二申请人），一个用于分子生物多样性研究（第一申请人）。迄今为止，全球已经发现了超过40000种金盏花。它们与食用植物的关系很少被研究。为了了解热带山林维持高生物多样性的机制，有必要对寄主特异性和沿海拔梯度的物种范围进行详细分析。由于分类学工作需要大量的时间和专家，我们的方法将是“反向分类学”：从开发物种特异性标记开始，对标本进行凭证，将数据库中每个凭证的元数据、序列数据和图像连接起来，以便以后使用相同的材料进行经典分类学工作。研究结果将用于检验一系列关于群落组成和物种存在与其他生物多样性和环境参数之间关系的生态学假设。

This project is a contribution to the development of workflows for the acceleration of biodiversity inventorying and for species re-identification in complex ecosystems, as described in the introductory text for the “ABA Ecuador” group. We will focus on a species-rich group of herbivorous beetles, the Chrysomelidae, and combine for this purpose the expertise of two different working groups, one for the taxonomy and biology of these beetles (second applicant), and one for molecular biodiversity research (first applicant). More than 40.000 species of Chrysomelidae have been described to date globally. Their relationship with food plants is little studied. A detailed analysis of host-specificity and of species ranges along altitudinal gradients is necessary to understand mechanisms that maintain high biodiversity in tropical mountain forests. Since taxonomic work requires much time and many experts, our approach will be “reverse taxonomy”: starting with the development of species-specific markers, vouchering of specimens, linking metadata, sequence data and images for each voucher in databases, to enable later classical taxonomic work with the same material. The results will be used to test a series of ecological hypotheses concerning the correlation of community composition and species presence with the diversity of other organisms and with environmental parameters.