Evolution of salt tolerance in plants
Salt tolerance in plants includes various strategies that enable the colonisation of saline environments. These adaptations control mechanisms related to water uptake and defence against ion toxicity within the plant and have evolved numerous times in the plant tree of life. We are investigating the evolutionary patterns of salt tolerance in plants, using a combination of phylogenetic and community assembly approaches, at a global and local scale for Australia. The results from this work can help us understand how biodiversity evolves in saline environments, and harsh environments in general. Additionally, phylogenetic patterns can help guide future studies to select plants for agriculture and bioremediation for salt-affected land, which presently represents 6% of the world’s total land area, and is expected to cover 17 million hectares over the next 50 years in Australia alone.
This work is done in collaboration with:
Phylogenetic Methods in Ethnobotany
I investigate evolutionary and cross-cultural patterns in medicinal plant use at different scales of human cultural proximity, plant phylogenetic relatedness, and space. Previous studies have found similarities in medicinal plant use between geographic regions and cultures at different spatial scales and it has been shown that phylogeny constrains plant use and some lineages are richer in medicinal plants than others. Combining taxonomic, phylogenetic, biogeographic and ethnobotanical information I aim to provide new insights into cross-cultural patterns in plant use, and test the use of phylogenetic tools for the discovery of new plant medicines.
This work is done in collaboration with:
- Julie Hawkins
- Vincent Savolainen
- Elizabeth Williamson
- RBG Edinburgh and RBG Kew have kindly provided access to their collections
SPEED project
The Spatially Explicit Evolution of Diversity (SPEED) project seeks to understand how the species niche has evolved and how the capacity for niche change might impact future patterns of species diversity in the face of ongoing climate change. Gaining an understanding of these niche dynamics entails understanding how species niches differ currently and how these differences evolved. We use combined approaches of evolutionary theory and ecology. Data on species occurrences and climate allow us to model the environmental niche of species and, ultimately, to estimate characteristics of species niches. Generating DNA sequences, we reconstruct species evolutionary relationships, which are combined with ecological characteristics, and species composition in communities to determine how evolutionary relationships influence the assembly of communities. We study several species rich groups characteristic of the Cape of South Africa, one the World’s Biodiversity Hotspots. The aim of the project is to understand how ecological similarities among species, represented by species evolutionary relationships, influence the composition of ecological communities.
The work is carried out in the groups of:
Systematics and Biogeography