NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2015

Sheth Seema N, St. Paul MN

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2015, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow to take transformative approaches to grand challenges in biology that employ biological collections in highly innovative ways. The title of the research plan for this fellowship to Seema Sheth is "Relationships among climatic tolerance, trait evolution, and diversification in the California flora." The host institution for this fellowship is the University of California, Berkeley, and the sponsoring scientists are Drs. David Ackerly and Bruce Baldwin. Certain geographic areas and evolutionary lineages harbor a greater number of species than others, yet the causes of such variation remain poorly understood. Lineages containing species with broad climatic tolerances may exhibit rapid trait and climatic niche evolution, which in turn could accelerate the accumulation of species via high speciation, low extinction, or both. The fellowship research assesses the relationships among diversification rates, rates of morphological and climatic niche evolution, and climatic tolerance to better understand the origins of plant diversity in the California Floristic Province, a botanically diverse region in temperate North America. Although the relationships among diversification rates, trait evolution, and climatic tolerances have been widely studied in animals, there have been fewer assessments in plants, largely due to limitations in the quality and availability of data. The California Floristic Province provides a unique opportunity to examine these relationships in a well-studied set of plant lineages, thereby improving our understanding of the origins of plant diversity and the limits to evolution in deep time. Spatial and phylogenetic analyses based on morphological and geographic data derived from herbarium specimens housed at the University and Jepson Herbaria are being used to shed light on the processes shaping geographic patterns of biodiversity, thus improving our ability to prioritize lineages and areas of conservation concern, forecast vulnerabilities to environmental change, and devise management strategies that preserve evolutionary history and unique genetic diversity. Training goals include gaining expertise in macroevolutionary and phylogenetic methods, performing open and reproducible scientific research, and managing and analyzing large datasets. Broader impacts include mentoring undergraduate students from historically underrepresented groups and dissemination of results to federal and state agencies that manage protected areas in California and similar ecosystems.