Dimensions of Biodiversity Project
What factors sustain plant diversity? How do plants persist in landscapes subject to climate change, disturbance, and habitat fragmentation? This project will investigate the evolutionary roots of plant diversity, how plant traits diversified, and how evolutionary history and traits affect species persistence and weedy plant invasions. The project focuses on Wisconsin where remarkably detailed data exist on shifts in the distribution, abundance, and diversity of forest and prairie plants over the past 50+ years. We will use DNA sequences to reconstruct relationships across the entire flora and quantify functionally significant traits across several hundred species. This will allow us to assess which ecological and evolutionary factors underlie historic shifts in species abundance and distribution. Analyses of genome size and genetic variation in a subset of species will demonstrate how dispersal and population dynamics affect geographic range and responses to habitat fragmentation and landscape dynamics. Data on historical community changes and climate projections will be used to predict future changes in range and abundance. This project will thus integrate our understanding of how plant traits evolve, how traits relate to ecological success, and how traits interact with phylogeny, genome size, and landscape conditions.
Plant diversity underlies ecosystem productivity and diversity, yet we still lack a clear picture of why most habitats are losing species while weedy plants are invading. This project will illuminate the mechanisms driving these changes and so improve our ability to manage natural and constructed ecosystems wisely. The trait and sequence data will also enhance national databases, facilitating further research.
