Central Research Focus:
The primary research focus of the laboratory is to discover the mechanisms underlying the origins of plant biodiversity and its distribution through space and time. We believe that a general long-term goal for those studying biodiversity should be to link the evolutionary processes underlying diversification to ecological patterns and interactions across scales. In our pursuit of these goals, the laboratory takes an integrative and comparative approach employing a diverse array of techniques, tools and insights from multiple disciplines. Although we are interested in all ecosystem types, the majority of our research takes place the tropics.
Functional and Phylogenetic Perspectives on Tropical Tree Biodiversity:
The spatial and temporal distribution of species diversity has fascinated biologists for decades. This attention has resulted in scores of mechanistic hypotheses. Ecological tests of these hypotheses have tended to focus on analyzing the abundance distribution or the species richness of an assemblage in relation to its environment. We argue that while this approach has been a cornerstone of ecological analyses it has serious limitations. One key limitation is that while species names themselves are important for biology and conservation, they convey little information about how species interact with their environments. This is problematic given that the majority of the hypotheses being tested in ecology are based upon how species interact with their abiotic and biotic environments.
Our research group over the past several years has demonstrated how viewing plant assemblages through the lens of functional biology can yield important new insights into the distribution and dynamics of species in tree communities. Some of our more interesting work has come from measuring plant traits on the tens to hundreds of species found in forest plots associated with the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) research network. One of our more important recent projects has focused on the old and important ecological question of the degree to which the temporal dynamics of a community are deterministic or stochastic. Traditionally this question has been addressed by examining the temporal trends in species names and abundances and patterns of species co-occurrence. Work taking this approach has suggested that species neutrally drift in and out of communities through time and that ecological interactions with the environment do not explain community dynamics. Our recent work has demonstrated that the lack of functional information in previous work has lead to faulty inferences of neutral drift. Indeed while it may appear that the Latin binomials of a tree community drift through time, the temporal dynamics of the functional composition are highly deterministic. This finding has many implications for basic community and ecosystem ecology research, but it has the important applied implication of suggesting that the future composition of tropical tree assemblages may be predictable given a particular global change scenario. We are now expanding this research program into a number of temperate zone and tropical CTFS forest plots around the world to investigate the ecological implications of woody plant functional diversity.
One exciting new development in the lab has been the infusion of next generation sequencing enabled transcriptomics (i.e. mRNA-seq) into this research approach. Specifically, with funding from NSF’s Dimensions of Biodiversity program and from the same program at NSF-China, we are examining the intra- and inter-specific transcriptomic diversity and its consequences in temperate and sub-tropical forest dynamics plots in the United States and China. The aim is to fully integrate phylogenetic, functional trait and transcriptome information into a single unified research program we call “Community Functional Phylogenomics”. This work is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Keping Ma, Dr. Zhanqing Hao and Dr. Xiangcheng Mi of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dr. Amy Wolf and Dr. Robert Howe of University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, and Dr. Andy Jones of Oregon State University.
Evolution of Plant Function within Lineages and its Ecological Implications:
Plant community ecologists are now demonstrating that tremendous insights can be gained by analyzing the distribution, abundance and richness of species through the lens of functional biology. A remaining key challenge for these, and most other, lines of ecological inquiry is to link the ecological patterns and processes being studied to the evolutionary processes that have generated biodiversity in the first place. In the case of functionally-based analyses of plant assemblages key questions are – when, where and why has functional diversity evolved?
Answering the above questions is, of course, not a trivial task particularly when one considers the tens to hundreds of tree species that may co-occur within a patch of forest that an ecologist surveys. Our laboratory has therefore begun to address these questions by analyzing the evolution of ecologically relevant traits in lineages that constitute the key components of a regional flora. In particular, we are investigating the evolution of plant traits in four genera (Coprosma [Rubiaceae], Pittosporum [Pittosporaceae], Pseudopanax [Araliaceae] and Hebe (a.k.a. Veronica) [Scrophulariaceae]) that constitute a significant proportion (>30%) of the woody plant flora of New Zealand. Each of these genera has recently radiated into nearly every habitat in New Zealand. To date we have been generating molecular phylogenies and leaf, wood and fruit trait datasets for each of the three genera with collaborators in the United Sates and New Zealand. The analyses thus far have been focused on the tempo and mode of functional trait evolution and climatic niche evolution. The goal of this research is to be able to quantify the evolution of function on the phylogeny for these major components of the woody New Zealand flora and link these evolutionary events to the functional co-existence of species on local scales. We have also expanded this work to the Hawaiian archipelago where the Coprosma and Pittosporum have each radiated into over ten species.
Biodiversity Informatics:
Biology has arrived at a golden age of informatics where disciplines ranging from genomics to biogeography are rapidly making incredible advances in our understanding of the planet. We believe that informatics approaches are a fundamental component of 21st century biology. Accordingly approximately half of the day-to-day research in our laboratory revolves around manipulating and analyzing large biological databases. The majority of this work to date has sought to address fundamental ecological and evolutionary hypotheses by linking geo-referenced plant specimen databases to plant trait databases and large phylogenetic trees.
We have used this informatics approach in a variety of ways from generating empirical and modeled distributions of woody plant functional diversity on regional to global scales to investigating the evolution of wood traits on the seed plant phylogeny. Although we believe these initial informatics-based projects have proven fruitful, we think much larger advances are on the horizon and the laboratory intends to be on the leading-edge of these advances. Currently we are focusing on integrating large phylogenetic trees with trait datasets and geographic information to produce continental scale maps of plant functional diversity.
The primary research focus of the laboratory is to discover the mechanisms underlying the origins of plant biodiversity and its distribution through space and time. We believe that a general long-term goal for those studying biodiversity should be to link the evolutionary processes underlying diversification to ecological patterns and interactions across scales. In our pursuit of these goals, the laboratory takes an integrative and comparative approach employing a diverse array of techniques, tools and insights from multiple disciplines. Although we are interested in all ecosystem types, the majority of our research takes place the tropics.
Functional and Phylogenetic Perspectives on Tropical Tree Biodiversity:
The spatial and temporal distribution of species diversity has fascinated biologists for decades. This attention has resulted in scores of mechanistic hypotheses. Ecological tests of these hypotheses have tended to focus on analyzing the abundance distribution or the species richness of an assemblage in relation to its environment. We argue that while this approach has been a cornerstone of ecological analyses it has serious limitations. One key limitation is that while species names themselves are important for biology and conservation, they convey little information about how species interact with their environments. This is problematic given that the majority of the hypotheses being tested in ecology are based upon how species interact with their abiotic and biotic environments.
Our research group over the past several years has demonstrated how viewing plant assemblages through the lens of functional biology can yield important new insights into the distribution and dynamics of species in tree communities. Some of our more interesting work has come from measuring plant traits on the tens to hundreds of species found in forest plots associated with the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) research network. One of our more important recent projects has focused on the old and important ecological question of the degree to which the temporal dynamics of a community are deterministic or stochastic. Traditionally this question has been addressed by examining the temporal trends in species names and abundances and patterns of species co-occurrence. Work taking this approach has suggested that species neutrally drift in and out of communities through time and that ecological interactions with the environment do not explain community dynamics. Our recent work has demonstrated that the lack of functional information in previous work has lead to faulty inferences of neutral drift. Indeed while it may appear that the Latin binomials of a tree community drift through time, the temporal dynamics of the functional composition are highly deterministic. This finding has many implications for basic community and ecosystem ecology research, but it has the important applied implication of suggesting that the future composition of tropical tree assemblages may be predictable given a particular global change scenario. We are now expanding this research program into a number of temperate zone and tropical CTFS forest plots around the world to investigate the ecological implications of woody plant functional diversity.
One exciting new development in the lab has been the infusion of next generation sequencing enabled transcriptomics (i.e. mRNA-seq) into this research approach. Specifically, with funding from NSF’s Dimensions of Biodiversity program and from the same program at NSF-China, we are examining the intra- and inter-specific transcriptomic diversity and its consequences in temperate and sub-tropical forest dynamics plots in the United States and China. The aim is to fully integrate phylogenetic, functional trait and transcriptome information into a single unified research program we call “Community Functional Phylogenomics”. This work is being conducted in collaboration with Dr. Keping Ma, Dr. Zhanqing Hao and Dr. Xiangcheng Mi of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dr. Amy Wolf and Dr. Robert Howe of University of Wisconsin – Green Bay, and Dr. Andy Jones of Oregon State University.
Evolution of Plant Function within Lineages and its Ecological Implications:
Plant community ecologists are now demonstrating that tremendous insights can be gained by analyzing the distribution, abundance and richness of species through the lens of functional biology. A remaining key challenge for these, and most other, lines of ecological inquiry is to link the ecological patterns and processes being studied to the evolutionary processes that have generated biodiversity in the first place. In the case of functionally-based analyses of plant assemblages key questions are – when, where and why has functional diversity evolved?
Answering the above questions is, of course, not a trivial task particularly when one considers the tens to hundreds of tree species that may co-occur within a patch of forest that an ecologist surveys. Our laboratory has therefore begun to address these questions by analyzing the evolution of ecologically relevant traits in lineages that constitute the key components of a regional flora. In particular, we are investigating the evolution of plant traits in four genera (Coprosma [Rubiaceae], Pittosporum [Pittosporaceae], Pseudopanax [Araliaceae] and Hebe (a.k.a. Veronica) [Scrophulariaceae]) that constitute a significant proportion (>30%) of the woody plant flora of New Zealand. Each of these genera has recently radiated into nearly every habitat in New Zealand. To date we have been generating molecular phylogenies and leaf, wood and fruit trait datasets for each of the three genera with collaborators in the United Sates and New Zealand. The analyses thus far have been focused on the tempo and mode of functional trait evolution and climatic niche evolution. The goal of this research is to be able to quantify the evolution of function on the phylogeny for these major components of the woody New Zealand flora and link these evolutionary events to the functional co-existence of species on local scales. We have also expanded this work to the Hawaiian archipelago where the Coprosma and Pittosporum have each radiated into over ten species.
Biodiversity Informatics:
Biology has arrived at a golden age of informatics where disciplines ranging from genomics to biogeography are rapidly making incredible advances in our understanding of the planet. We believe that informatics approaches are a fundamental component of 21st century biology. Accordingly approximately half of the day-to-day research in our laboratory revolves around manipulating and analyzing large biological databases. The majority of this work to date has sought to address fundamental ecological and evolutionary hypotheses by linking geo-referenced plant specimen databases to plant trait databases and large phylogenetic trees.
We have used this informatics approach in a variety of ways from generating empirical and modeled distributions of woody plant functional diversity on regional to global scales to investigating the evolution of wood traits on the seed plant phylogeny. Although we believe these initial informatics-based projects have proven fruitful, we think much larger advances are on the horizon and the laboratory intends to be on the leading-edge of these advances. Currently we are focusing on integrating large phylogenetic trees with trait datasets and geographic information to produce continental scale maps of plant functional diversity.