Meeting: Linking and uniting micro and macroevolution; September, 2016, Santa Barbara, CA

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Evolutionary biologists have identified changes in the rates of speciation and extinction as factors that give rise to the strikingly disparate patterns of species richness across the tree of life. For example, the diversity of the 2000+ species of cichlid fishes is due, in part, to shifts in the rate of speciation within several groups of African and south American lineages, but there are other parts of the tree of life (e.g., coelacanth fishes) that have remained virtually unchanged for millions of years. The success in characterizing the tempo of species diversification reflects the growth of phylogenetic comparative biology over the last twenty years. Despite this success, important questions remain regarding the population-level mechanisms that give rise to unequal speciation and extinction rates. This workshop will bring together biologists with expertise across a range of evolutionary and ecological disciplines to develop new perspectives on how species diversity patterns have evolved across vast temporal and spatial scales. Scientists will synthesize current ideas about how population level processes might scale up to produce species richness patterns and identify new research directions for understanding how speciation, reproductive isolation, and persistence of populations influence biodiversity patterns. New synthesis in this area is necessary to spur the development of new theory that better connects branches of biology that have largely worked independently of one another. The work will provide important insight into understanding past evolution but will also provide tools to understanding the future of life. This proposal will support a workshop focused on identifying the major gaps that exist in our understanding of the microevolutionary processes that underlie biodiversity patterns at phylogenetic scales. The major product of this workshop will be a review that both articulates major questions that need to be answered to advance macroevolutionary study and identifies fruitful avenues forward for answering these questions. This review will help to advance research at the interface of comparative biology, population biology, speciation, metapopulation dynamics, evolved, and paleobiology. Workshop participants will span early, mid- and late career scientists and includes strong representation of female scientists. This proposal will provide training to two graduate students who will assist with the organization of the meeting and the development of the draft manuscript.