{"id":245121,"date":"2017-08-22T15:29:40","date_gmt":"2017-08-22T18:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=245121\/"},"modified":"2017-08-22T15:42:19","modified_gmt":"2017-08-22T18:42:19","slug":"seeking-to-understand-the-origin-of-the-forest-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/seeking-to-understand-the-origin-of-the-forest-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeking to understand the origin of the forest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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l\u00e9o ramos chaves<\/span><\/a> Dried and pressed branches are stored as records of plant species, such as this Pyrostegia venusta<\/em>l\u00e9o ramos chaves<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Published in April 2016<\/em><\/p>\n

Regardless of how thoroughly biologists might study the earth, the trees and bodies of water, they still seem far from gauging and explaining the biodiversity of tropical forests. By the same token, there is no scientific explanation for how or when mountains, rivers and everything that lies beneath the forests actually emerged. Scientists whose projects focus on Amazonia and the Atlantic Forest are now seeking answers: biologists and geologists are joining forces in an attempt to decipher this history, in a field geologist Paul Baker, of Duke University coined geogenomics in 2014. This new field of study has been given significant impetus from the collaboration between the Biota-FAPESP program and the Dimensions of Biodiversity, a National Science Foundation (NSF) program \u2014 the United States\u2019 leading science funding agency. \u201cProjects of this nature require a participatory approach from the time the questions are first being hammered out,\u201d says 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 are leading the first project to cement this partnership, focused on Amazonia.<\/p>\n

To assemble the teams, they first needed to overcome basic communication barriers. \u201cA geologist would deliver a speech, and the biologists would be at a loss,\u201d Lohmann says. And the opposite was also true. \u201cIn the first meeting, we spent two hours trying to explain a single slide to the geologists,\u201d recalls biologist Cristina Miyaki, also from IB-USP, who heads a similar project, focused 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 them with the geological data,\u201d Lohmann notes. Lohmann and her colleagues have planned a trip to the Amazon in 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 that is not always what is observed when biologists use DNA analyses to retrieve information on the history of a species. \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, who is based at the University of Salford in England. Boubli is also affiliated with the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), which allows him access to the institution\u2019s large collection of primate samples. \u201cWe have an almost complete coverage of Amazonian primate samples, and with genomics we\u2019ll be able to investigate the role of the major rivers in the origins of primate diversity,\u201d he says, looking ahead. On the basis of a new phylogeny for New World titi monkeys (Callicebus<\/em>), published in March 2016 in the Frontiers in Zoology <\/em>journal, Boubli, his doctoral student Hazel Byrne and their colleagues cite deep divergences, which justify the creation of two new genera: Cheracebus<\/em>, for species from the Negro and Orinoco rivers, and Plecturocebus<\/em>, in the southern region of Amazonas State. Callicebus<\/em> would be reserved for species from the Atlantic Forest. \u201cThey may be the key to everything,\u201d Boubli says. It is 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