| 项目编号: | 1354884
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| 项目名称: | Collaborative Research: Evolution, Diversification, and Conservation of a Megadiverse Flagship Lichen Genus |
| 作者: | Thorsten Lumbsch
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| 承担单位: | Field Museum of Natural History
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| 批准年: | 2013
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| 开始日期: | 2014-08-01
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| 结束日期: | 2018-07-31
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| 资助金额: | USD274861
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| 资助来源: | US-NSF
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| 项目类别: | Standard Grant
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| 国家: | US
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| 语种: | 英语
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| 特色学科分类: | Biological Sciences - Environmental Biology
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| 英文关键词: | lichen
; evolution
; diversification
; large lichen fungal genus
; species
; project
; understanding
; sticta
; evolutionary history
; lichen genus sticta
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| 英文摘要: | Lichens are symbiotic associations between a fungus and one or more algae or cyanobacteria. They perform critical ecological functions such as soil stability and water purification in many ecosystems. The lichen genus Sticta plays these roles in forest and woodland ecosystems in temperate and tropical regions. Due to their large size and capacity to store and release large amounts of water, these lichens contribute to the water cycle, including in regions that are water reservoirs for urban areas. Most species contain cyanobacteria that fix atmospheric nitrogen and thus function as biological fertilizers. Sticta species are particularly sensitive indicators of ecological disturbance, air pollution and global climate change, and have therefore disappeared from many habitats over vast geographical regions in the Northern Hemisphere. Although Sticta includes 120 species, genetic data suggest that perhaps as many as 400 species await discovery throughout the world, particularly in tropical mountains. An international team of researchers seeks to fully elucidate Sticta diversity using modern genomic approaches, and reconstruct its evolutionary history to further our understanding of the role of global climatic shifts and geological events on the diversification of these symbiotic fungi. This knowledge is critical in understanding and conserving their important ecological roles they play for our society. The project also contains components of citizen science and outreach materials aimed at public education and ecotourism.
This project brings together a broad array of tools to elucidate the evolution and diversification of Sticta within a framework of historical biogeography, including a combination of traditional and next-generation DNA sequencing methods, to test the viability of DNA barcoding for a large lichen fungal genus. The research will begin with targeted collection of Sticta specimens which will be used for DNA sequence and morphological analyses. Using phylogenetic methods the project will infer species delimitations, divergence dates among lineages, biogeography, ecological niche and morphological character state reconstructions. Novel approaches that effectively integrate molecular and morphological data are implemented. This includes morphology-based phylogenetic binning to place historical type specimens within the molecular phylogeny. These tools will resolve the biodiversity questions within Sticta and generate tools essential to their identification. The evolution of phenotypes and photosymbiodemes (lichens that include two different types of photobionts) and their importance for the understanding of morphogenesis and interactions of fungal and algal or cyanobacterial partners in lichens will be studied. The project trains two postdocs and includes two international workshops. |
| 资源类型: | 项目
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| 标识符: | http://119.78.100.158/handle/2HF3EXSE/96145
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| Appears in Collections: | 影响、适应和脆弱性
气候减缓与适应
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| Recommended Citation: | |
Thorsten Lumbsch. Collaborative Research: Evolution, Diversification, and Conservation of a Megadiverse Flagship Lichen Genus. 2013-01-01.
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