Dimensions: Collaborative Research: A community level approach to understanding speciation in Hawaiian lineages

生物多样性研究的最新进展在两个不同的方向上取得了进展：首先关注生物体如何随时间变化，其次关注特定时间内生物多样性的空间格局。拟议的研究将这两种方法结合在一起，以了解动态背景下的生物多样性。基础研究问题是：(1)不同生物群体的多样化速度和顺序如何由它们所生活的群落决定，以及(2)多样化的顺序如何决定最终的群落组成？这项研究的重点是昆虫和蜘蛛，并利用夏威夷群岛年轻岛屿的已知动态地质学，其中不同的当代遗址代表了地质序列的各个阶段，作为一个系统来检查适应、种群分化和相关群落演替之间的反馈。方法包括：(1)基因组学和其他分子工具来测量最近到达这些新栖息地的相互作用物种群体的积极多样化；(2)生态学和计算方法来测量物种组成随时间的变化。这项研究将确定随着种群在时间上的分化和空间上的聚集，物种在群落中作用变化的重要性，以及动态群落在促进多样化方面的作用。这项工作还通过测试优先级、序列和相关相互作用强度的重要性，为入侵和保护生物学以及恢复生态学的应用领域提供了信息。该项目将培养多名本科生、研究生和博士后，从事进化生物学和生态学交叉领域的研究。

Recent advances in biodiversity research have led to progress in two separate directions that focus first on how organisms change over time, and second on spatial patterns of biodiversity at a given time. The proposed research brings together these two approaches to understand biodiversity in a dynamic context. Fundamental research questions are: (1) how are the rate and order of diversification in different groups of organisms determined by the community in which they live, and (2) how does the sequence of diversification dictate the resulting community composition? The research focuses on insects and spiders and uses the known dynamic geology of the young islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, where different contemporary sites represent stages in a geological sequence, as a system for examining feedbacks between adaptation, population divergence, and associated community succession. Methods include: (1) genomic and other molecular tools to measure active diversification of interacting groups of species that are recent arrivals to these novel habitats, and (2) ecological and computational approaches to measure changes in species composition over time.The research will determine the importance of changing roles of species within communities as populations diverge over time and assemble in space, and the role of that dynamic community in fostering diversification. The work also informs applied areas of invasion and conservation biology, and restoration ecology, by testing the importance of priority, sequence, and associated interaction strengths. The project will train multiple undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdocs in research at the intersection between evolutionary biology and ecology.