COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Mechanisms of Diversification in West African Rainforest Amphibians and Reptiles

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Understanding the processes that generate and maintain high species diversity in tropical ecosystems has remained a prominent question in evolutionary biology for over a century. As habitat degradation threatens the survival of countless tropical species, this project is a timely and necessary endeavor that will identify processes that have generated the incredible biodiversity of reptiles and amphibians in West and Central Africa, one of the most diverse regions on Earth. This project will address outstanding questions in biodiversity research and accelerate the pace of biodiversity discovery of the region's rich amphibian and reptile fauna by coupling the rapid generation of genetic data with traditional morphological and ecological data to discover and describe new species, by developing new computational tools for comparative biology, and by providing computational approaches for addressing key questions in biodiversity studies, thereby increasing the accessibility of genome analysis to a diversity of organisms. The project brings together an international team with expertise in African biodiversity. In addition, this project will help train the next generation of systematic biologists by providing valuable training to talented and diverse pools of undergraduate and graduate students at two collaborating institutions.Methodological advances in both data collection and analysis enable precise quantification of demographic and evolutionary histories of populations and species at an unprecedented scale, allowing sophisticated approaches to inform biodiversity studies of imperiled fauna. This project will collect genome-scale data using next-generation sequencing for co-distributed amphibians and reptiles across West and Central Africa in order to infer biodiversity patterns and processes. First, the researchers will discover cryptic diversity using emerging species delimitation methods that can accommodate genome-scale data. Second, inferences of phylogeny, gene flow, and historical populations sizes will impart insight into the idiosyncrasies of biodiversity patterns among the different species, while seeking to test hypotheses concerning shared historical patterns. Third, the PIs will develop new methods for comparative phylogeographic inference aimed at testing models of simultaneous diversification among species.