HOTMED · Evolutionary origin of biodiversity hotspots with a Mediterranean climate (HOTMED)

Final Activity Report Summary - HOTMED (Evolutionary origin of biodiversity hotspots with a Mediterranean climate)

Mediterranean-climate regions host an important part of the World's biodiversity. Their extraordinary species richness and high endemism, along with the threat from human activities, have led to identify all these regions as 'biodiversity hotspots'. This project focused on the evolutionary origin of these hotspots in the past so as to better achieve their conservation in the future. The plant family proteaceae which is widespread in the Southern hemisphere but most diverse in two Mediterranean biomes, namely southwest Australia and the cape floristic region, and has an exceptional fossil record, was chosen as a model group to address these questions. The outgoing phase of this project at the Botanic Gardens Trust in Sydney, Australia, focussed on transfer of knowledge between the leading expert of the group, Dr Peter Weston, and the Marie Curie Fellow, Dr Hervé Sauquet. This resulted in a very successful collaboration, producing two major data sets, namely the largest morphological data set to date for proteaceae and a comprehensive database of fossil proteaceae. The fellow also established a collaborative network on reconstructing the evolutionary history of the group, involving partners in Australia, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States. Field work was conducted in various regions of Australia where the group was abundant, including the Mediterranean-climate hotspot of southwest Australia. The return phase of this project at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew concentrated on data analysis. The largest molecular data set to date for the group was assembled and analysed to produce a solid phylogenetic tree. This was used in conjunction with the morphological and fossil data sets to set robust fossil calibrations for estimating the timing of the proteaceae evolution. Molecular dating analyses were conducted using the most elaborate available methods and the resulting framework was used to estimate diversification rates of the group, both inside and outside of Mediterranean hotspots. All these methods were learned and applied by the fellow thanks to the expertise of the scientist-in-charge, Dr Vincent Savolainen, and colleagues at Kew and Imperial College. In addition, the fellow was given the opportunity to mentor three students. The main result arising from this project was that species' richness in Mediterranean hotspots was because of exceptional diversification rates, due to high speciation or low extinction, and not just because of long accumulation of species over time. This was submitted for publication in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, United States. Two other published articles and one in preparation also arose from this project. In addition, the work was extensively presented at six international conferences and six seminar talks in Australian institutions. It was often acclaimed as a showcase of how the fossil record could be treated rigorously to infer evolutionary history and had effectively promoted the benefits of international mobility and collaboration with the European Union.

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