Abstract Detail

Macroevolution

Feng, Keyi [1], Smith, Stephen [2].

Exploring the role of habitat fragmentation in Caryophyllaceae alpine-arctic plant evolution.

Alpine-arctic plants are some of the most threatened organisms on the planet, given current predictions of global climate change trajectory. Not only it is important to understand their biology to better preserve their biodiversity, alpine-arctic plants are also scientifically significant by having unique adaptations associated with their survival to extreme and rapidly changing environments. The fragmentation of alpine-arctic habitat offers a special model for plant evolution. The fragments can be seen as islands in the ocean, if ignoring the extremely cold temperature and a lack of dense vegetation. The unsuitable environment in between fragments restricts the dispersal of alpine-arctic plants and lead to genetic divergence among populations. Theoretically, this paves a route to higher speciation rate, comparing to lineages with more continuous geographic distribution. To explore the relationship between the degree of habitat fragmentation and speciation rate in plant clades that contain alpine-arctic decendents, I conductd a study with the family Caryophyllaceae, as it contains several cold lineages, such as Colobanthus, Cerastium, and Silene. I built species-level phylogenies and formed speices distribution models to quantify the degree of fragmentation. MiSSE, hidden-state-only speciation and extinction model, and BAMM are applied to the phylogenetic trees to investigate relationship between speciation rate and the degree of habitat fragmentation.

1 - University Of Michigan, EEB, 1105 N University Ave, 3050D, Ann Arbor, MI, 48104, United States
2 - University of Michigan

Keywords:
Caryophyllaceae
alpine
arctic
speciation rate
habitat fragmentation.

Presentation Type: Poster
Number: PMC001
Abstract ID:109
Candidate for Awards:None