IRFP: Climatic Niche Evolution in South American Trees and its Consequences

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The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This fellowship funds Dr. Kyle Dexter to spend 24 months conducting research with Dr. Oliver Phillips, of Leeds University, and Dr. Toby Pennington, of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.The focus of the project is to investigate the evolution of climatic niches through time in South American trees. The 3-way collaboration takes advantage of several existing large-scale networks of tree plots in diverse climatic zones of South America, the ecological expertise of Dr. Phillips, the phylogenetic expertise of Dr. Pennington, and the expertise of Dr. Dexter in integrating ecological and phylogenetic approaches. More specifically, the research plan is to synthesize taxonomy across the plot networks, which are found in different climatic biomes (e.g. rainforest, dry forest, savannah), and to then construct phylogenies, or evolutionary trees, for all genera of angiosperms and all species of the Leguminosae present in the plot networks. This will allow the investigators to examine how evolutionary lineages, be they families, genera, or species, have shifted among climatic biomes through time. This project will elucidate the role of climatic preference switching in driving speciation of trees and give insights into the future of South American forests under climate change. For example, the investigators will be able to assess which lineages are more vulnerable under alternative future climatic scenarios and how much evolutionary history may be lost if specific climatic biomes disappear.