SUPR
Avian phylogenomics
Dnr:

NAISS 2024/5-187

Type:

NAISS Medium Compute

Principal Investigator:

Per Ericson

Affiliation:

Naturhistoriska riksmuseet

Start Date:

2024-04-01

End Date:

2025-04-01

Primary Classification:

10612: Biological Systematics

Allocation

Abstract

The project aims to increase the understanding of mechanisms involved when organisms adapt to different environments, which bears on their capacity to rapidly adapt to climate change. We use landscape genomics to study how the genetics of a species vary spatially and what environmental factors drive adaptation in a group of closely related species adapted to different environments. Our study system, the bowerbird family (Ptilonorhynchidae), consists of 28 species in New Guinea and Australia. These species are all sedentary and have adapted to vastly different habitats (montane forests, tropical and subtropical rainforests, and more arid woodlands and scrublands) and are distributed along an elevational gradient ranging from the coast to above 2,900 m asl. This adaptive diversity allows a study of the degree of parallelism and divergent adaptations at different levels of genetic organization (e.g., substitutions, genes, and pathways). We will also estimate the relative roles of adaptation from standing (ancestral) variation and de novo mutations in different species.