Biodiversity and host specificity of chrysomelid beetles in a tropical montane rainforest ecosystem

该项目有助于制定工作流程，以加快生物多样性的清点和复杂生态系统中物种的重新确定，如“厄瓜多尔律师协会”小组的介绍性案文所述。我们将把重点放在草食性甲虫的一个物种丰富的群体，叶甲科，并为此结合了两个不同工作组的专业知识，一个是这些甲虫的分类和生物学(第二个申请者)，另一个是分子生物多样性研究(第一个申请者)。到目前为止，全球已描述了40.000多种叶甲科物种。它们与食用植物的关系鲜有研究。为了了解热带山地森林维持高生物多样性的机制，有必要对寄主专一性和沿海拔梯度的物种范围进行详细分析。由于分类学工作需要大量时间和许多专家，我们的方法将是“反向分类学”：首先开发特定物种的标记，为标本提供担保，将数据库中每一张凭证的元数据、序列数据和图像联系起来，以使以后的经典分类学工作能够处理相同的材料。这些结果将被用来检验一系列关于群落组成和物种存在与其他生物多样性和环境参数之间的相关性的生态学假说。

This project is a contribution to the development of workflows for the acceleration of biodiversity inventorying and for species re-identification in complex ecosystems, as described in the introductory text for the “ABA Ecuador” group. We will focus on a species-rich group of herbivorous beetles, the Chrysomelidae, and combine for this purpose the expertise of two different working groups, one for the taxonomy and biology of these beetles (second applicant), and one for molecular biodiversity research (first applicant). More than 40.000 species of Chrysomelidae have been described to date globally. Their relationship with food plants is little studied. A detailed analysis of host-specificity and of species ranges along altitudinal gradients is necessary to understand mechanisms that maintain high biodiversity in tropical mountain forests. Since taxonomic work requires much time and many experts, our approach will be “reverse taxonomy”: starting with the development of species-specific markers, vouchering of specimens, linking metadata, sequence data and images for each voucher in databases, to enable later classical taxonomic work with the same material. The results will be used to test a series of ecological hypotheses concerning the correlation of community composition and species presence with the diversity of other organisms and with environmental parameters.