Phylogenetic Ecology of invertebrate Communities in Bromeliads

Bromeliads are tropical plants, terrestrial or epiphytic, that grow in the shape of a rosette. Some of them form water tanks, which can harbor a variety of aquatic organisms, primarily invertebrate species, that build complex food webs.
The general goal of this project is to understand ecological and evolutionary processes that drive the assembly and determine the composition and structure of this communities.
There have been a lot of previous research on structure of bromeliad communities, an important part of it leaded by The Bromeliad Working Group, which has gathered information of them along Central and South America. However, there has not been analyses on the phylogenetic patterns of these communities.
Community phylogenetics allows us to evaluate the phylogenetic diversity and relatedness of the species in the community and associate these patterns with different processes such as the strength of environmental selection or biotic interactions at different spatial or temporal scales. We will explore these patterns by analyzing molecular information that will be obtained during the development of the project, and ecological information previously gathered by the BWG… TBC

Faculty Supervisor:

Diane Srivastava

Student:

Partner:

Rutgers University

Discipline:

Life Sciences

Sector:

Education

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program: