Abstract

0530267 Johnson --- This Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) award supports a five-year project that enables students and/or faculty from two American, one Canadian, two Chilean and three Argentinian universities to work together to examine the impact of geological and climatic events on the evolutionary history of animal and plant species in Patagonia. Little is known about the phylogeography of the area, i.e., the impact of historical events such as glacial cycles, mountain building and river captures on the speciation and demographic histories of Patagonian species. The team will reconstruct and compare the phylogeographic histories of fishes, crabs, lizards, frogs, and plants by making field collections, undertaking molecular and morphological studies of biodiversity, and testing various biogeographical hypotheses. The award will enable participants from Brigham Young University, the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Dalhousie University (Canada), and the Universidad de Concepcion (Chile), the Universidad Austral de Chile, and the Centro Nacional Patagonico (CENPAT), all in Chile, and the Universidad Nacional del Comahue, and the Instituto Botanico Darwinion, both in Argentina, to build sustainable international collaborations in evolution, ecology and conservation biology. This project will bring together over 100 scientists and/or students from the United States, Canada, Chile and Argentina, collectively representing eight institutions of higher education. The project involves a diverse combination of education and outreach activities including field research experiences for U.S. undergraduates and graduate students in which students will work on multiple taxa, graduate field courses taught by North and South American scientists, focused workshops and annual regional meetings for faculty and students, and a web-based portal for communicating within the project and for reporting the results in both English and Spanish; these dimensions will be complemented by study-abroad internships supported by non-NSF funds. Co-funding for this project comes from the Division of Environmental Biology.