Collaborative Research: ARTS: Identifying diversity, describing species, and revising taxonomy of New Guinean snakes

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Located just north of Australia, the island of New Guinea is a biodiversity hotspot but one of the least studied regions of the world. Simultaneously, New Guinea suffers from high rates of deforestation; from 1972 - 2002, 24% of the eastern half of the island's forests were cleared or degraded through logging. This means that there are many threatened organisms that we know little about. Although not as popular with humans as animals like birds of paradise, snakes are important to the ecology of the island, with many snakes being top predators that have large impacts on the ecosystem. Snakes also provide lesser known but important benefits to humans, such as medical drugs made from venoms. Despite the importance of snakes in the island ecosystem, the majority of New Guinean species remain poorly studied and there are likely many species not yet described. This project focuses on two of the most poorly studied groups of snakes in New Guinea, the groundsnakes and the keelbacks. Scientific efforts for this project include expeditions to New Guinea to find these snakes, gather genetic and morphological data, and use this information to identify new species, determine how the species are related to each other, and place these species in the broader context of snake relationships, ultimately resulting in novel contributions to the assessment of New Guinean biodiversity. This work also provides new scientific training to the senior scientists conducting the study and to undergraduates and graduate students from both the United States and New Guinea. Resulting publications will be open-access and online wiki pages will be created for each new species discovered with the help of undergraduate students funded by this work; all results can thus be accessed by scientists, educators, and the global public alike. The senior scientists will also use both their associated museum and university platforms to publicly present results at all educational levels, from children to adults. This interweaving of science and education will train effective scientists, contribute to public knowledge, and foster international relations. The alpha taxonomy of New Guinean snakes is poorly known and multiple lines of evidence suggest substantial undescribed diversity (only ca. 75% of species are currently recognized). Furthermore, few or none of the species from the focal genera have been included in published molecular phylogenies and thus are essentially unknowns in modern systematic studies. This project has four fundamental objectives: (1) Conduct fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, as well as in Indonesia and the Philippines, to complement current sampling for groundsnakes (Stegonotus) and keelbacks (Tropidonophis) for use in high-throughput DNA sequencing efforts (target capture) and contemporary morphological data collection by generating high-resolution CT scans and including contrast-enhanced scans stained with diffusible iodine. (2) Use museum specimens to fill in sampling gaps when fresh tissues are unobtainable using a recently published protocol for sequencing of fluid-preserved specimens. (3) Describe new species and the intrageneric relationships from the focal genera in a revisionary monograph based on a combination of molecular and morphological data. (4) Train the next generation of taxonomists and simultaneously expand the tool kit for both the principal investigators and for U.S. and Papua New Guinea undergraduate and graduate students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.