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

Summary
Phylogeography is one of the most integrative disciplines within biology, involving genetics, ecology, geospatial analyses, climatology and computer science. Despite its potential to unravel the determinants that shape biodiversity and to predict the effects of global changes on organisms, phylogeography has not yet been projected onto a unified ecological and evolutionary framework, mainly because most studies rely only on restricted subsets of species without revealing patterns at community levels. The Eco-PhyloGeo project aims to fill this gap for the West Mediterranean butterflies by creating and correlating two datasets: i) a high-resolution assessment of the genetic diversity for the mitochondrial gene COI of all the butterfly species occurring in this area, and ii) a dataset for the main ecological traits of all European butterflies. A substantial amount of the data are already available to the ER and the supervisor, and the datasets will be completed by training-through-research. In addition, the creation of new phylogeographic indexes will allow the partitioning of species genetic structure over space in nestedness and turnover components. The project has two ambitious yet feasible objectives: 1) Complete and freely release the DNA and the species traits datasets together with a R package to allow a wide use of these resources in biogeography, ecology and taxonomy. 2) Provide for the first time a mathematical background to link species phylogeography with ecological traits for an entire and large animal taxon. Given the novelty of the analyses and the unprecedented geographic resolution and taxonomic completeness of the datasets (around 12,000 sequences and about 20 ecological traits for 450 butterfly species), the Eco-PhyloGeo is expected to have a great impact on the scientific community represent a key step towards drawing out general rules in phylogeography and ultimately determining biodiversity patterns.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/658844
Start date: 01-09-2015
End date: 31-08-2017
Total budget - Public funding: 170 121,60 Euro - 170 121,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

Phylogeography is one of the most integrative disciplines within biology, involving genetics, ecology, geospatial analyses, climatology and computer science. Despite its potential to unravel the determinants that shape biodiversity and to predict the effects of global changes on organisms, phylogeography has not yet been projected onto a unified ecological and evolutionary framework, mainly because most studies rely only on restricted subsets of species without revealing patterns at community levels. The Eco-PhyloGeo project aims to fill this gap for the West Mediterranean butterflies by creating and correlating two datasets: i) a high-resolution assessment of the genetic diversity for the mitochondrial gene COI of all the butterfly species occurring in this area, and ii) a dataset for the main ecological traits of all European butterflies. A substantial amount of the data are already available to the ER and the supervisor, and the datasets will be completed by training-through-research. In addition, the creation of new phylogeographic indexes will allow the partitioning of species genetic structure over space in nestedness and turnover components. The project has two ambitious yet feasible objectives: 1) Complete and freely release the DNA and the species traits datasets together with a R package to allow a wide use of these resources in biogeography, ecology and taxonomy. 2) Provide for the first time a mathematical background to link species phylogeography with ecological traits for an entire and large animal taxon. Given the novelty of the analyses and the unprecedented geographic resolution and taxonomic completeness of the datasets (around 12,000 sequences and about 20 ecological traits for 450 butterfly species), the Eco-PhyloGeo is expected to have a great impact on the scientific community represent a key step towards drawing out general rules in phylogeography and ultimately determining biodiversity patterns.

Status

TERMINATED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2014-EF

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2014
MSCA-IF-2014-EF Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF-EF)