CAREER: Teaching Modern Biodiversity Science from Fieldwork to Phylogeny: Diversity, Systematics, & Evolution of Ecologically Promiscuous Aquatic Beetles

职业：教授现代生物多样性科学，从实地考察到系统发育：多样性、系统学、

• 批准号: 1453452
• 负责人: Andrew Short
• 金额: $ 69.78万
• 依托单位: University of Kansas Center for Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-03-01 至 2023-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1453452&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Teaching; Modern; Biodiversity; Science

Animals living in freshwater and terrestrial habitats are presented with dramatically different physiological and morphological challenges, including how they breathe, move, feed, and reproduce. While animals, particularly insects, have shifted between these habitat extremes many times over their evolutionary history, little is known of how these major aquatic-terrestrial transitions occur or how they affect the diversity and distribution of species. This research will focus on an insect group that contains species with a wide range of habitats from open waters to terrestrial leaf litter. By reconstructing the evolutionary history of this lineage, the researchers will examine when, where, and how it has evolved across the aquatic-terrestrial boundary, and use the group as a model to understand how other organisms may have undergone major habitat shifts. Understanding how insects undergo major ecological transitions and what implications these transitions have can improve our understanding of how animals respond to changing climates and altered environments. The broader impacts of this research include the training of two PhD students in the biodiversity sciences. A new undergraduate course in biodiversity monitoring and assessment will be developed to teach the theory, methods, and practice of measuring species richness and turnover over geographic distances. This course will include fieldwork in Suriname and Guyana in conjunction with host country institutions. This research will use water scavenger beetles (Coleoptera: Hydrophilidae), a lineage that encompasses many independent transitions between aquatic and terrestrial niches, as a model to examine habitat shifts at multiple evolutionary scales: clades, species, and populations. Researchers will (1) infer a 500-species molecular phylogeny to identify the number, timing, and placement of habitat shifts and test for associated changes in diversification rate between habitat types, (2) examine the fine-scale morphological evolution associated with changing habitats through a species-level taxonomic revision of the Chasmogenus-group, including the description of approximately 50 new species, coupled with a morphological-molecular phylogeny, and (3) disentangle habitat-associated from lineage-specific effects on co-distributed populations by using RAD-seq methods to examine the genetic structure of 12 species with diverse ecological niches across three independent clades. Taken together, these approaches will provide new insights into how aquatic-terrestrial shifts have altered past evolutionary trajectories from the recent to hundreds of millions of years before present, and inform how organisms may respond to changing habitats in the future.

生活在淡水和陆地栖息地的动物面临着截然不同的生理和形态挑战，包括它们如何呼吸，移动，进食和繁殖。虽然动物，特别是昆虫，在它们的进化历史中多次在这些栖息地极端之间转换，但很少有人知道这些主要的水生-陆地过渡是如何发生的，或者它们如何影响物种的多样性和分布。这项研究将集中在一个昆虫群，其中包含的物种具有广泛的栖息地，从开放的沃茨到陆地落叶。通过重建这一谱系的进化历史，研究人员将研究它在何时、何地以及如何跨越水生-陆地边界进化，并将该群体作为模型来了解其他生物如何经历重大的栖息地变化。了解昆虫如何经历重大的生态转变以及这些转变的含义可以提高我们对动物如何应对气候变化和环境变化的理解。这项研究的更广泛的影响包括培训两名生物多样性科学博士生。将开发一门新的生物多样性监测和评估本科课程，教授测量地理距离上物种丰富度和周转率的理论、方法和实践。该课程将包括与东道国机构一起在苏里南和圭亚那进行实地考察。 这项研究将使用食水甲虫（鞘翅目：Hydrophilidae），一个谱系，包括水生和陆生生态位之间的许多独立的过渡，作为一个模型来研究栖息地的变化在多个进化尺度：分支，物种和人口。研究人员将（1）推断500个物种的分子遗传学，以确定栖息地转移的数量，时间和位置，并测试栖息地类型之间多样化率的相关变化，（2）通过物种水平的分类学修订检查与栖息地变化相关的细尺度形态进化Chasmogenus组，包括对大约50个新物种的描述，（3）通过RAD-seq方法研究了12个物种的遗传结构，分析了共分布种群的生境相关和谱系特异性效应。总之，这些方法将提供新的见解，从最近到数亿年前，水生-陆地变化如何改变过去的进化轨迹，并告知生物如何应对未来不断变化的栖息地。