Eco-PhyloGeo · Linking phylogeography to ecology: extracting rules for butterfly biodiversity at large spatial scale

Linking phylogeography to ecology: extracting rules for butterfly biodiversity at large spatial scale

"Biological diversity is the result of the emergence of new species and their expansion through dispersal or contraction. These phenomena highly depend on peculiar features of the species, defined as ""traits"", and typically comprising size, dispersal capacity, feeding and reproductive ecology. Together with traits, present and past environmental factors like competitors, vegetational and geological features and climatic dynamics play a fundamental role. Phylogeography is the study of the spatial distribution of genetic lineages and it is currently one of the most integrative disciplines within biology, involving genetics, ecology, geomorphology, climatology and computer science. Phylogeography advances in recent decades allowed a better understanding of species emergence and distribution, thus allowing to predict their future occurrence and to develop evidence-based conservation strategies. Despite its potential, phylogeography has not yet been projected onto a unified ecological and evolutionary framework, mainly because most studies relied on restricted subsets of species without focussing on the whole communities.The Eco-PhyloGeo project aimed to fill this gap for West Mediterranean butterflies by creating and correlating two datasets: i) a high-resolution assessment of the mitochondrial gene COI of all the species occurring in this area, and ii) a dataset for their ecological traits. The project had two main objectives: 1) Complete and release the COI and species traits dataset to allow their use in biogeography, ecology and taxonomy. 2) Improve the methodological background to link phylogeography with ecological traits. The action has been concluded eight months before due to a new employment of the researcher but most the goals has been achieved. In particular a web site has been constructed where about 15,000 of COI sequences for about 400 European species are freely available together with a series of ecological traits for the same species. A citizen science project with the same name has been also created (http://www.inaturalist.org/projects/io-database-butterflies) and hundreds of occurrence data have been collected by butterfly amateurs. Finally, four papers where butterfly phyloegeography has been linked to a series of morphological and ecological traits have been published. It must be noted that the integrative approach of the EcoPhyloGeo project has also allowed the discovery of a new butterfly species (Spialia rosae) in the Iberian peninsula. Understanding the mechanisms underlying the emergence of species, their expansion or contraction and the connected risk of extinction is a fundamental prerequisite in conservation ecology, mostly in a historical period when rapid environmental changes are producing fast and often unpredictable responses in living organisms."

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз