Phylogeography of a Regional Fauna: Rocky Shores of the North Pacific

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Rocky-shore ecology has provided many important insights into the interactions among organisms and their environments. Despite a deep mechanistic understanding of the processes shaping contemporary community structure on rocky shores, comparatively little is known about the long-term persistence and historical assembly of these communities. The focus of this research uses genetic data to reconstruct the latitudinal and demographic responses of rocky-shore marine organisms to Quaternary climate change. Because genetic data can be collected from all types of living organisms and long-term persistence of a species geographic range generates a fundamentally different geographic pattern of genetic diversity than a recent range expansion, phylogeographic data can be used to reconstruct the recent demographic and latitudinal histories of entire communities. This work will build significantly on previous efforts by conducting a phylogeographic survey with sufficient taxonomic and ecological breadth to address fundamental questions about community-wide responses to environmental change. The research will test the hypothesis that habitat differences can explain differential latitudinal responses of species to climate change, thereby revealing what types of species are most sensitive to changes in climate. The broader impacts include providing support and training for graduate and undergraduate students and a postdoctoral researcher. This project will also provide outreach to a grade school in California: a small component of the research will be a collaborative effort with a teacher who will incorporate the project into the science curriculum to provide students with hands-on science experience and exposure to hypothesis testing, scientific methods, and biogeography.