Community and ecosystem consequences of adaptive evolution in Eucalyptus. There is emerging evidence across plant systems that genes in one species influence biodiversity and the services ecosystems provide, including soil fertility, carbon storage, and pollination. These results suggest that adaptive evolution in plants can lead to change in biodiversity and ecosystem function. If this finding proves to be true, results from this proposal might be critical to future decisions on the ecosystem ....Community and ecosystem consequences of adaptive evolution in Eucalyptus. There is emerging evidence across plant systems that genes in one species influence biodiversity and the services ecosystems provide, including soil fertility, carbon storage, and pollination. These results suggest that adaptive evolution in plants can lead to change in biodiversity and ecosystem function. If this finding proves to be true, results from this proposal might be critical to future decisions on the ecosystem consequences of landscape level selective events. There may be major implications for the rapidly expanding environmental and forestry plantings across Australia and temperate regions of the world where choice of seed source may have far reaching consequences.Read moreRead less
Breaking Gondwana: interplay between tectonics, climate and resources. The project aims to reconstruct 250 million years of landscape evolution in response to rifting and break-up of the Gondwana supercontinent, using the innovative approach of combining regional thermochronology with global plate tectonic models. From these reconstructions, the time-integrated record of exhumation and erosion at the continental margins will be revealed at an unprecedented scale. The main expected outcome will b ....Breaking Gondwana: interplay between tectonics, climate and resources. The project aims to reconstruct 250 million years of landscape evolution in response to rifting and break-up of the Gondwana supercontinent, using the innovative approach of combining regional thermochronology with global plate tectonic models. From these reconstructions, the time-integrated record of exhumation and erosion at the continental margins will be revealed at an unprecedented scale. The main expected outcome will be a deep time archive of the relationships between tectonic forcing, continental erosion and the global climate, which may assist predictions and debate on future climate change. The outcomes will also provide economic benefits as they will inform on the exhumation and preservation of (critical) mineral resources.Read moreRead less
Interpreting biological sequence information: untangling hybridisation. Hybridisation is believed to be important during adaptive radiations where species rapidly colonise new niches and respond to new environments, e.g. in times of climate change. This project will create the statistical tools and software required for evolutionary biologists to understand how hybridisation has helped shape the Australian flora.