The geographic mosaic of coevolving plant-insect lineages

该项目将分析植物和昆虫之间的共同进化如何形成不同生态系统中物种之间相互作用的网络。该项目将解决当前生物学的主要挑战之一，即相同的物种群体如何以及为什么在不同的生态系统中以不同的方式相互作用。具体目标是了解相互作用的物种群体在共同进化并将其地理范围扩展到新环境时如何在遗传和生态上发生分歧。这项研究将利用北美西部一组常见植物物种与一组昆虫物种之间的相互作用，这些昆虫物种是这些植物的主要食草动物和传粉者。DNA测序和相关的分子方法将用于评估这些相互作用的物种在生态系统中的遗传联系。这项工作的第二部分将结合不同昆虫对花的利用的实地观察和花的形态测量，以评估这些相互作用的植物和动物的特征是否在地理上有所不同。这将为共同进化的地理马赛克理论提供一个检验，该理论预测花性状与昆虫物种的匹配强度随着植物和昆虫竞争物种的存在而变化。工作的第三部分将使用实验室实验来量化自然选择在不同生态系统中形成不同花性状的机制。总的来说，这些遗传和生态学研究将有助于更广泛地了解生命网络如何在生态系统中组织空间，以及在不同环境条件下相互作用的物种网络如何变化是否存在可预测的模式。深入了解物种网络的组织对于预测气候变化的后果以及保护和恢复生态系统的生物完整性至关重要。该奖项还将支持培养生态学和进化领域跨学科研究的研究生和本科生以及一名博士后。

This project will analyze how coevolution between plants and insects shapes the web of interactions among species in contrasting ecosystems. This project will address one of the current major challenges in biology, which is how and why the same groups of species interact in different ways in different ecosystems. The specific goal is to understand how groups of interacting species diverge genetically and ecologically as they coevolve and expand their geographic ranges into new environments. The study will use interactions between a group of common plant species in western North America and a group of insect species that are the major herbivores and pollinators of those plants. DNA sequencing and related molecular methods will be used to evaluate how populations of these interacting species are genetically connected across ecosystems. The second part of the work will combine field observations of the use of flowers by the different insect species with measurements of floral morphology to assess whether the traits of these interacting plants and animals differ geographically. This will provide a test of the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution, which predicts that the strength of matching of floral trait to insect species varies with the presence of competing species of both the plant and insect. The third part of the work will use laboratory experiments to quantify the mechanisms by which natural selection shapes floral traits differently in the different ecosystems.Collectively, these genetic and ecological studies will contribute to a broader understanding of how the web of life is organized spatially across ecosystems, and whether there are predictable patterns in how networks of interacting species change under different environmental conditions. A deeper understanding of the organization of species networks is crucial to predicting the consequences of climate change, and to conserving and restoring the biological integrity of ecosystems. This award will also support the training of graduate and undergraduate students and a postdoctoral fellow in interdisciplinary research at the interface of ecology and evolution.