International Team Receives $4M to Study Dimensions of Biodiversity

Posted on October 11, 2013

CCNY, New York Botanical Garden, University of São Paulo scientists to develop framework to explain and predict distribution of biological diversity

A multidisciplinary, international team of researchers has been awarded nearly $4 million to develop a broad interdisciplinary framework to explain and predict plant and animal species distribution in Brazil’s endangered Atlantic Forest. Scientists from The City College of New York (CCNY), New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) and University of São Paulo (USP) comprise the team, which is co-led by CCNY’s Ana Carnaval and USP’s Cristina Miyaki.

“By studying the Atlantic Forest climate and landscape and their changes over the last 120,000 years, our team will learn how forest species have responded to repeated environmental shifts of the past,” said Dr. Carnaval, a native of Brazil who is now an assistant professor of biology at City College. “This understanding can be instrumental in the face of ongoing climate change by enabling us to predict how species will respond to future environmental shifts.”

NSF and NASA are jointly funding the study in the United States through NSF’s Dimensions of Biodiversity program. The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), São Paulo state’s research foundation, is supporting the research in Brazil. Both countries are contributing roughly equal amounts to the project, which is expected to span five years.

A multinational network of collaborators is bringing its expertise to the group, as well. It includes scientists from the State University of New York, the American Museum of Natural History, University of California Santa Cruz, University of North Carolina, Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (France), Australian National University and several Brazilian colleges and universities.

In pre-Columbian times, Brazil’s Atlantic Forest extended for 3,000 kilometers and formed a fringe of forests sandwiched between the ocean and the drier uplands of the Brazilian shield. Today, the forest is reduced to less than 11 percent of its historical range, yet its fragments harbor some of the highest concentrations of indigenous species that cannot be found anywhere else on Earth.

The investigators will apply a hypothesis-based framework to reconstruct scenarios of past climate change. They will incorporate climatological models based on what is known about the Earth cycles, information from fossil records and inferences of past levels of humidity based on the geochemistry of deposits on caves. Genetic data from present-day populations will then be used to understand how the Atlantic Forest species responded to those changes.

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