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

一个多世纪以来，了解热带生态系统中产生和维持高度物种多样性的过程一直是进化生物学中的一个突出问题。由于栖息地的退化威胁着无数热带物种的生存，这个项目是一个及时而必要的努力，它将确定在西非和中非（地球上最多样化的地区之一）产生令人难以置信的爬行动物和两栖动物生物多样性的过程。该项目将通过将快速生成的遗传数据与传统的形态学和生态学数据相结合，发现和描述新物种，开发新的比较生物学计算工具，并为解决生物多样性研究中的关键问题提供计算方法，解决生物多样性研究中的突出问题，加快该地区丰富的两栖动物和爬行动物的生物多样性发现步伐。从而增加了基因组分析对生物多样性的可及性。该项目汇集了一个具有非洲生物多样性专业知识的国际团队。此外，该项目将通过为两个合作机构的有才华和多样化的本科生和研究生提供有价值的培训，帮助培养下一代系统生物学家。在数据收集和分析方法上的进步，使人口统计和种群及物种的进化历史在前所未有的规模上得到精确的量化，使复杂的方法能够为濒危动物的生物多样性研究提供信息。该项目将利用新一代测序技术收集西非和中非共同分布的两栖动物和爬行动物的基因组规模数据，以推断生物多样性的模式和过程。首先，研究人员将使用能够适应基因组规模数据的新兴物种划分方法来发现隐藏的多样性。其次，对系统发育、基因流动和历史种群规模的推断将有助于深入了解不同物种之间生物多样性模式的特质，同时寻求检验有关共同历史模式的假设。第三，pi将开发新的比较系统地理推断方法，旨在测试物种之间同时多样化的模型。

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.