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

合作研究：西非雨林两栖动物和爬行动物的多样化机制

• 批准号: 1457232
• 负责人: Matthew Fujita
• 金额: $ 42.61万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Arlington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-03-15 至 2019-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1457232&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: COLLABORATIVE; RESEARCH; Mechanisms; Diversification; West

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.

世纪以来，了解热带生态系统中物种多样性的产生和维持过程一直是进化生物学中的一个突出问题。由于栖息地退化威胁着无数热带物种的生存，这个项目是一个及时和必要的奋进，将确定在西非和中非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，这是地球上最多样化的地区之一。该项目将解决生物多样性研究中的未决问题，加快发现该区域丰富的两栖动物和爬行动物群的生物多样性的步伐，方法是将快速生成的遗传数据与传统的形态和生态数据相结合，以发现和描述新物种，开发新的比较生物学计算工具，并提供计算方法，以解决生物多样性研究中的关键问题，从而增加了对多种生物体进行基因组分析的可及性。该项目汇集了一个具有非洲生物多样性专门知识的国际团队。此外，该项目将通过为两个合作机构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。数据收集和分析方法的进步使人口和物种的进化历史能够以前所未有的规模精确量化，允许采用先进的方法为濒危动物的生物多样性研究提供信息。该项目将利用下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，以推断生物多样性模式和进程。首先，研究人员将使用能够容纳基因组规模数据的新兴物种划界方法来发现隐藏的多样性。第二，推断的遗传，基因流和历史种群规模将传授洞察不同物种之间的生物多样性模式的特质，同时寻求测试有关共享的历史模式的假设。第三，PI将开发新的方法进行比较地理推断，旨在测试物种之间同时多样化的模型。