The geographic mosaic of coevolving plant-insect lineages

该项目将分析植物和昆虫之间的共同进化如何塑造对比生态系统中物种之间的相互作用网络。 该项目将解决生物学目前面临的主要挑战之一，即相同的物种群体如何以及为什么在不同的生态系统中以不同的方式相互作用。 具体目标是了解相互作用的物种群体如何在遗传和生态上分化，因为它们共同进化并将其地理范围扩展到新的环境中。 这项研究将利用北美西部一组常见植物物种和一组昆虫物种之间的相互作用，这些昆虫物种是这些植物的主要食草动物和授粉者。 DNA测序和相关的分子方法将用于评估这些相互作用的物种的种群如何在生态系统中遗传连接。 这项工作的第二部分将结合联合收割机对不同昆虫物种使用花朵的实地观察和对花朵形态的测量，以评估这些相互作用的植物和动物的特征是否在地理上存在差异。 这将提供一个测试的共同进化的地理镶嵌理论，该理论预测，花卉性状的匹配强度与昆虫物种的植物和昆虫的竞争物种的存在而变化。 第三部分的工作将使用实验室实验来量化自然选择在不同生态系统中塑造不同花特征的机制。总的来说，这些遗传和生态研究将有助于更广泛地了解生态系统中生命网络的空间组织方式，以及在不同环境条件下相互作用的物种网络如何变化的可预测模式。更深入地了解物种网络的组织对于预测气候变化的后果以及保护和恢复生态系统的生物完整性至关重要。 该奖项还将支持研究生和本科生以及生态学和进化界面跨学科研究的博士后研究员的培训。

This project will analyze how coevolution between plants and insects shapes the web of interactions among species in contrasting ecosystems. This project will address one of the current major challenges in biology, which is how and why the same groups of species interact in different ways in different ecosystems. The specific goal is to understand how groups of interacting species diverge genetically and ecologically as they coevolve and expand their geographic ranges into new environments. The study will use interactions between a group of common plant species in western North America and a group of insect species that are the major herbivores and pollinators of those plants. DNA sequencing and related molecular methods will be used to evaluate how populations of these interacting species are genetically connected across ecosystems. The second part of the work will combine field observations of the use of flowers by the different insect species with measurements of floral morphology to assess whether the traits of these interacting plants and animals differ geographically. This will provide a test of the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution, which predicts that the strength of matching of floral trait to insect species varies with the presence of competing species of both the plant and insect. The third part of the work will use laboratory experiments to quantify the mechanisms by which natural selection shapes floral traits differently in the different ecosystems.Collectively, these genetic and ecological studies will contribute to a broader understanding of how the web of life is organized spatially across ecosystems, and whether there are predictable patterns in how networks of interacting species change under different environmental conditions. A deeper understanding of the organization of species networks is crucial to predicting the consequences of climate change, and to conserving and restoring the biological integrity of ecosystems. This award will also support the training of graduate and undergraduate students and a postdoctoral fellow in interdisciplinary research at the interface of ecology and evolution.