{"id":223108,"date":"2016-08-22T16:50:56","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T19:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/?p=223108"},"modified":"2017-08-21T18:12:06","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T21:12:06","slug":"seeking-to-understand-the-origin-of-the-forest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/seeking-to-understand-the-origin-of-the-forest\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeking to understand the origin of the forest"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dried

L\u00e9o Ramos<\/span>Dried and pressed branches are stored as records of plant species, like this Pyrostegia venusta<\/em>L\u00e9o Ramos<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

For as much as biologists explore the ground, trees and bodies of water, they still appear to be far from gauging and explaining the biological diversity of the tropical forests. And by the same token, there is no explanation for how and when mountains, rivers and everything that lies beneath the forest emerged. Projects focused on Amazonia and the Atlantic Forest are now searching for answers: biologists and geologists are joining forces to find a way to decipher that history, in a field that geologist Paul Baker of Duke University labeled geogenomics in 2014. This new field of study has been given significant impetus by the collaboration between the Biota-FAPESP program and Dimensions of Biodiversity, a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the principal science funding agency in the United States. \u201cProjects of this nature require a participatory approach from the time the questions are first being hammered out,\u201d comments botanist L\u00facia Lohmann of the Biosciences Institute at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (IB-USP). Lohmann and American ornithologist Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History head the first project to cement such a partnership, focused on Amazonia.<\/p>\n

In order to assemble the teams, they first needed to overcome basic barriers to communication. \u201cA geologist would give a talk, and the biologists would be lost,\u201d Lohmann says. And the opposite was also true. \u201cAt the first meeting, we spent two hours explaining a single slide to the geologists,\u201d recalls biologist Cristina Miyaki, also from IB-USP, who heads a similar project that focuses on the Atlantic Forest. Once a common vocabulary was established, the exchanges began to take shape. \u201cNow it\u2019s clear that projects of this nature need to have researchers from both fields from the outset, but that wasn\u2019t the perspective before we started,\u201d Lohmann says.<\/p>\n

Another nontrivial obstacle to consolidating knowledge is the scarcity of data. \u201cWe need to have all the phylogenies dated, with georeferenced databases, in order to produce distribution maps before we can cross-reference with the geological data,\u201d Lohmann notes. She and her colleagues have planned a trip to the Amazon for 2016. \u201cWe\u2019re going to collect data from different organisms to assess the extent to which the Negro and Branco rivers present barriers to dispersal.\u201d<\/p>\n

One can easily imagine that rivers carrying large volumes of water would limit the movement of organisms, but when biologists use DNA to retrieve information on the history of a species, that is not always what they see. \u201cRivers do not appear to be significant barriers to plants,\u201d says Lohmann, who specializes in the family Bignoniaceae. But primate mobility may be limited in such cases, as shown by Brazilian primatologist Jean Philippe Boubli at the University of Salford, in England. He is also a researcher at the National Institute for Research on the Amazon (INPA), which allows him access to that institution\u2019s large collection of primate samples. \u201cWe have nearly full coverage of samples of Amazonian primates, and with genomics we\u2019ll be able to investigate the role of the major rivers in the origin primate diversity,\u201d he says, looking ahead. With a new phylogeny for New World titi monkeys (Callicebus<\/em>), published in March 2016 in the journal Frontiers in Zoology<\/em>, Boubli, his doctoral student Hazel Byrne and colleagues cite deep divergences that justify the creation of two new genera: Cheracebus<\/em>, for species from the Negro and Orinoco rivers, and Plecturocebus<\/em>, in southern Amazonas State. Callicebus<\/em> would be reserved for species from the Atlantic Forest. \u201cThey may be the key to everything,\u201d Boubli says. It\u2019s a very old, species-rich group, and therefore ideal for testing the role of factors such as rivers and climate change in species diversification. \u201cThe collaboration with geologists is opening our eyes to things we didn\u2019t know about Amazonia,\u201d he comments.<\/p>\n