Despite being one of the most biologically diverse habitats on the planet, the description of tropical rain forests and the understanding of their evolutionary history are far from complete. Furthermore, there is an increasing need for assessing global biodiversity changes especially in tropical rainforests, due to their role as global biodiversity repositories. West Central Africa represents the area of greatest biodiversity richness within tropical Africa and with the highest percentage of untouched pristine forest for the whole of Africa and Madagascar. West Central African biodiversity not only faces the challenges of climate change, but also human pressure with the highest population growth rates in the world. This project will contribute to the ongoing Global Legume Diversity Assessment programme, that is being developed to improve our understanding of biodiversity loss using legumes, the third largest family of angiosperms, as a proxy. The project will focus on tribe Detarieae, which are the dominant component of West Central African forests, and thus an ideal exemplar clade for the proposed study. The project aims at reconstructing phylogenetic relationships within Detarieae and produce a temporal framework for the diversification of the group. The phylogenetic diversity patterns will be investigated to identify hotspots of recent speciation and evolutionary diversity and their correlation with land use changes, biodiversity loss, and extinction risks. The project also includes a full IUCN conservation assessment for all studied species, thus obtaining an indication of survivability for Detarieae in West Central Africa under climate change while considering different emission scenarios proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Given that the legume family has been shown to be a good proxy for botanical diversity in general, the results obtained here will be invaluable for the preservation of biodiversity in this region of the world.

Biodiversity conservation has become a priority concern for both science and society. Human population growth and resource exploitation have impacted on worldwide species richness, and affecting evolutionary trajectories of species and the stability of ecosystems. The increased focus on understanding biodiversity and its sustainable use have evolved concurrently with the new genomic (next-generation sequencing, NGS) and bioinformatic techniques that have revolutionized the availability of DNA sequence data for comparative biodiversity studies and lead to the emergence of Phylogenomics, in which evolutionary relationships are recovered based on comparative analyses of genome-scale data. The overarching goal of the proposed project, YAMNOMICS, is to elucidate the evolutionary relationships within the highly diverse genus Dioscorea (Dioscoreaceae). The genomic-scale methods proposed in this project constitute the key for this goal and open up opportunities for the researcher and YAMNOMICS participants to generate substantial and long-term career outputs in biodiversity science. Dioscorea contains 600 species distributed in the tropics and with a low representation in temperate regions, and includes crops that feed tens of millions worldwide. Its economic importance is complemented by other species which accumulate secondary steroidal compounds of pharmacological interest. Molecular studies in yams have focused on studying species of agricultural interest.Additionally, Dioscorea constitutes a focus of interest in evolutionary studies due to its high diversity and the enormous distribution range of its lineages. Several studies focused on the phylogeographic patterns at low taxonomic levels for endangered species. Broader molecular approaches have dealt with phylogenetic relationships des, establishing a Cretaceous Laurasian origin. However traditional molecular methods remain insufficient to determine evolutionary relationships among recently derived species.

How do biodiversity and ecosystem functioning respond to climate change? Currently, fundamental knowledge gaps prevent us from answering this most pressing question. Global climate is largely dependent on tropical forest functioning due to the scale of plant-driven ecosystem services that they provide (water and carbon cycling). Thus, research on tropical plants is essential to address the question. However, critical plant groups such as palms, which are hyperdominant in tropical forests, remain almost entirely neglected. The intricate relationship between plants and the environment is mediated by functional traits, but current models do not yet account for the dynamics of species and functional composition and thus fail to predict plant/climate responses accurately. This critical knowledge gap is the primary focus of PALMHYDRAULICS. The project will use palms as a model group to explore hydraulic traits, which are pivotal in plant/climate responses, but unstudied in palms, despite their importance. PALMHYDRAULICS will focus on the structure, ecology and evolution of palm hydraulic functioning. Through a novel, integrated research programme, PALMHYDRAULICS will use cutting-edge analyses to disentangle the role of trade-offs in plant hydraulic structure relating to species diversification, intraspecific variation, structural development and individual survival that underpin feedback mechanisms between plant effect on and responses to climate change. This comprehensive, ambitious approach builds on the world leadership of the host institution in integrated studies of the palm family, plant morphology and evolution, its unrivalled collections, and the complementary expertise of the host scientists and experienced researcher. Novel and extensive datasets will be produced and made openly accessible, and findings will be disseminated through the most prestigious scientific journals and a comprehensive public communication plan.