US-Chile Planning Visit to Establish a Collaborative Study on the Role of Ecological Gradients in Shaping Mutualistic and Antagonistic Interactions

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US-CHILE PLANNING VISIT TO ESTABLISH A COLLABORATIVE STUDY ON THE ROLE OF ECOLOGICAL GRADIENTS IN SHAPING MUTUALISTIC AND ANTAGONISTIC INTERACTIONSThis proposal seeks to create a new intellectual partnership between US and Chilean researchers to explore the dynamics of interactions between plants and animals along steep elevation gradients. The Chilean collaborators are the entomologist Dr. Cristian Villagra (Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educacion), and the chemical ecologist Dr. Alejandro Urzua (Universitad de Santiago), while the US-based collaborator is Dr. Sergio Rasmann (University of California, Irvine), an evolutionary ecologist who studies the chemical make-up of plant-insect interaction. This study will investigate the origin of the diversity of interactions between plants, the insects that pollinate their flowers, and the insects that consume them (herbivores). The central focus of this project is to determine how these interactions are shaped by ecological gradients, plant chemistry, and/or evolutionary history. By understanding the forces that shape species interaction, the researchers will shade light on the mechanisms that generate and maintain biodiversity on Earth. Natural communities are maintained and have evolved along complex webs of mutualistic and antagonistic interactions. How these interactions, between plants, their pollinators, and their antagonistic herbivores, are shaped by natural selection and maintained within particular habitats remains a dominant question in community ecology. The international collaboration will take advantage of the plant genus Haplopappus (Asteraceae), which includes 60 species scattered from the Pacific coast up to 5000 m above sea level in the Chilean cordillera. The goal of this project is to evaluate the true functionality of Haplopappus spp. flower and leaf morphology and chemical make-up diversity along steep elevation gradients, and to dissect how biotic or abiotic factors, or evolutionary constraints interact to maintain community variation across contrasting habitats. This proposed project will specifically ask: 1) How do animal community and plant traits change along elevation gradients in Chile? 2) What are the biotic and abiotic constraints in maintaining the faunal diversity of pollinators? And 3) how does plant chemistry influences plant-animal species interactions?