UNRAVELING EVOLUTION OF SOUTH AMERICAN FORESTS: HIGH DIVERSITY AND MULTIPLE EVOLUTIONARY HISTORIES

South American forests are worldwide known to hold high levels of biodiversity and singularity of organisms. However, understanding of patterns and processes that shape this biological diversity is not a trivial task for biologists. Recently, a bunch of evolutionary studies from this region has revealed that diversification cannot be attributed to a few or single diversification hypothesis. Instead, many hypotheses have been proposed to explain evolution of South American forests. In this talk I will show a sample of studies that we are conducting at the Federal University of Bahia, which seek to contribute to understanding the complex evolutionary history of the South American forests. Specifically, I will show the integration of ecological niche models and population genetics tools to comprehend the evolutionary history in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. I will also present ongoing hybrid zone studies from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Finally, I will present studies that investigated which factors govern the diversification of organisms across the South America.

Henrique Batalha Filho is a professor from Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil. He is currently a visiting researcher in the CIBIO-InBIO research group TROPBIO. He is interested in comprehending patterns and processes that underlie evolutionary diversification of the Neotropical biota. His studies use genetic (sanger and genomic data), phenotypic and ecological data to investigate how species diversify in space and time.

Host: [Fernando Sequeira, Tropical Biology]

Image credits: Henrique Batalha Filho