CAREER: Gypsum Endemics of the Chihuahuan Desert: Exploring the origins and diversification of an edaphic flora using comparative phylogenetics and phylogeography

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This project integrates a vigorous research program to understand the evolution of plants restricted to unusual soils with an equally vigorous effort to improve high school and college student understanding of core concepts in evolutionary biology. Plant species that grow only on unusual soils, such as serpentine soils (high concentration of metals), bogs (low pH), or evaporites (high salinity), comprise a substantial proportion of plant biodiversity worldwide, but surprisingly little is known about their evolutionary history. For example, do plant lineages restricted to these unusual soils persist over long periods of evolutionary time? Likewise, how have such lineages responded to past climate changes? This project will answer such questions using a large but poorly studied group of plants that grow only in gypsum-rich soils within the Chihuahuan Desert of the US and Mexico. By generating and analyzing large DNA sequence data sets, the detailed evolutionary histories of 12 diverse gypsum-restricted plant groups in the Chihuahuan Desert will be reconstructed and compared. This international research program represents the first comprehensive effort to understand the origin and evolutionary diversification of a large, soil-restricted group of plant species, and consequently will vastly improve our understanding of how soils influence plant evolution and how soil-restricted plants will respond to ongoing climate change. This project will also provide a novel and engaging framework for improving evolutionary literacy in high school and college students, by employing a combination of high school teacher workshops, innovative undergraduate biology laboratory activities at a liberal arts college, and extensive mentoring of student researchers.