This award will support a Doctoral Dissertation Enhancement Project for Doctoral Student Felipe Zapata working with his advisor Peter Stevens. The research objectives of project are to identify and delimit the species in the plant genus Escallonia, and to reconstruct their evolutionary history using multivariate analyses of morphological measurements taken from herbarium specimens, combined with phylogenetic analyses of sequences from chloroplast and nuclear markers. Morphological and molecular patterns will be integrated with temporal (e.g., node dating), ecological (e.g., field data), and geographic (e.g., geographic barriers) variables to shed light on the historical biogeography of the genus and to suggest potential mechanisms for its diversification. Research in Brazil will be studied in collaboration with Dr. Lucia G. Lohmann from the department of Botany at the University of Saõ Paulo, in Saõ Paulo, Brazil.
