RII Track-4: Enhancement of technical and analytical skills for the application of genomics to research in molecular ecology and comparative phylogeography

University Of Mississippi, University MS

Investigators

Abstract

Non-technical description: Biodiversity, or the variety of species in an ecosystem, is declining in many areas of the world due to climate change. Many unanswered questions remain as to how ecosystems respond to changing environmental conditions, including changing climates, and how biodiversity is affected by large scale environmental changes. This fellowship will enable research using genetic techniques to study how organisms have responded to past and recent environmental change. The PI will collaborate with colleagues at the Ohio State University to understand how the numbers and genetic variability of four invertebrate species found in southern Appalachian forests change as their environment changes. The new skills gained by the PI will provide long-term benefits to the fellow, the home institution (University of Mississippi), and home state. The fellowship will also generate new opportunities for sustained collaboration with the host institution (Ohio State University). Findings will advance understanding of whether whole communities have the ability to respond to environmental change together, or as individual species. This information will aid in conservation and management of US forest fauna. Technical description: Understanding the impact of different historical events and recurrent microevolutionary processes on how co-distributed species show concerted versus independent responses to environmental change allows stronger predictions about how ecological communities will respond to future change. Such a comparative approach can probe the importance of the strength of ecological co-associations among species in constraining or facilitating their responses. As part of this fellowship, population genomic data will be generated and analyzed for a set of four southern Appalachian forest invertebrate species that together enable the impact of strength of ecological co-association on phylogeographic congruence to be assessed. The host institution (Ohio State University) will work with the PI in sequencing reduced representation libraries, computational approaches for performing downstream bioinformatics processing, and implementation of established and emerging phylogeographic analyses. The PI and host will also collaborate on developing analyses that extend the scope of comparative phylogeographic inference.