Catalysis Meeting

Integrating historical biogeography and phylogeography with the fossil record and landscape history

PI(s): Catherine Badgley (University of Michigan (Ann Arbor,MI))
Brett Riddle (University of Nevada-Las Vegas)
Start Date: 1-Nov-2012
End Date: 31-Oct-2013
Keywords: biogeography, phylogenetics, paleontology, climate change, macroevolution

We propose to organize a catalysis meeting on the theme of diversification of North American rodents based on historical biogeography, phylogeography, fossils, and landscape history. The research group includes specialists in paleoecology, biogeography, molecular phylogenetics, evolution, functional morphology, isotope ecology and physiology, landscape history, and computational methods and represents the first synthesis of its kind. The group will focus on North American rodents and landscape history over the last 25 million years to forge conceptual and methodological bridges across disciplines for effective collaboration. The goal is to develop a research program to evaluate how landscape history, including tectonics and climate, influences diversification of rodents in different geohistorical contexts. The wealth of information available to be synthesized and range of expertise in the research group offer strong prospects for achieving fundamental insights about ecological and evolutionary processes affecting diversification. The meeting will focus on integrating phylogenetic, paleontological, paleoenvironmental, and geohistorical datasets and framing of tractable research questions that will form the basis for proposal(s) to NSF. We anticipate that this research will become a model for analyzing diversity dynamics across spatial and temporal scales for a broad range of groups and geohistorical records.