Recent advances in biodiversity research have led to progress in two separate directions that focus first on how organisms change over time, and second on spatial patterns of biodiversity at a given time. The proposed research brings together these two approaches to understand biodiversity in a dynamic context. Fundamental research questions are: (1) how are the rate and order of diversification in different groups of organisms determined by the community in which they live, and (2) how does the sequence of diversification dictate the resulting community composition? The research focuses on insects and spiders and uses the known dynamic geology of the young islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, where different contemporary sites represent stages in a geological sequence, as a system for examining feedbacks between adaptation, population divergence, and associated community succession. Methods include: (1) genomic and other molecular tools to measure active diversification of interacting groups of species that are recent arrivals to these novel habitats, and (2) ecological and computational approaches to measure changes in species composition over time.
The research will determine the importance of changing roles of species within communities as populations diverge over time and assemble in space, and the role of that dynamic community in fostering diversification. The work also informs applied areas of invasion and conservation biology, and restoration ecology, by testing the importance of priority, sequence, and associated interaction strengths. The project will train multiple undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdocs in research at the intersection between evolutionary biology and ecology.
