Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in Biology for FY 2009

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY 2009. The fellowship supports a research and training plan entitled "Historical causes of biodiversity: the effects of evolution, ecology, and time on latitudinal species richness gradients" for Robert Pyron. The host institution for this research is Stony Brook University, and the sponsoring scientist is John Wiens.One of the most obvious and fundamentally important aspects of biology is the vast amount of biodiversity observed worldwide, which is concentrated in the tropics. A latitudinal gradient in species richness (i.e., higher tropical biodiversity) is one of the oldest and most debated patterns in ecology and evolutionary biology, and dozens of hypotheses have been proposed to explain it. However, many hypotheses ignore the processes that directly change the number of species in discrete areas (i.e., speciation, extinction, dispersal), and no single explanation has been able to satisfactorily explain the gradient across taxa. This research examines the underlying causes of latitudinal diversity gradients in two of the most diverse vertebrate groups, squamate reptiles (lizards and snakes) and amphibians (frogs, salamanders, and caecilians) by using genomic, museum, and environmental bioinformatic databases to quantify the contributions of ecological, temporal, and evolutionary factors to global patterns of biodiversity and attempts to develop new statistical methods to study these patterns. Understanding the causes of the development and distribution of species richness is crucial given the current biodiversity extinction crisis we now face, particularly in amphibians.The training objectives of this fellowship are to strengthen skills related to both computational analysis using large-scale bioinformatic databases, as well as an increased knowledge of global biodiversity patterns, specifically in squamates and amphibians. The integration of computational bioinformatics and organismal phylogenetics will also permitinterdisciplinary collaborations with researchers worldwide.