Format: ORAL

Diana Medelln-Zabala1, Oscar M. Vargas2, Deise Pereira Gonalves1, Raquel C. Pizzardo1, Andre Chanderbali3, Douglas Soltis3, Pam Soltis3, Stephen Smith1 Christopher Dick1

1 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA 2 Department of Biological Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA 3 Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA

Lecythidaceae (Ericales) is a pantropical family of woody plants of ca. 278 tree species with three subfamilies: Foetidioideae (Madagascar), Planchonioideae (Asia and Africa), and Lecythidoideae (ca. 232 species) restricted to the Neotropics. This family is within the 20 most-species rich families of trees in the lowland Amazon forests, providing important ecological services such as carbon sequestration and food resources for pollinators and seed dispersers. The global center of species richness and ecological importance is in the Amazon basin and Guiana Shield, where most Lecythidaceae research has been focused. However, there are genera occurring in the Andean and Choc Biogeographic regions where several knowledge gaps lie. Despite multiple studies having been performed for Lecythidaceae, there are still incongruences among hypotheses about the evolution of this family. To infer the geographic history of Lecythidaceae in the Neotropics, and identify areas of importance for its diversification, we performed a Maximum Likelihood analysis in IQ-TREE, based on nuclear markers targeted by the Angio353 probes in 94 species, and an ancestral range reconstruction, using a dispersal-extinction-cladogenesis model (DEC) in BioGeoBEARS. According to our results, there is a high uncertainty about the ancestral area for the Neotropical clade. However, the Southeastern Amazonia was reconstructed as the most probable ancestral area for the zygomorphic-flowering clade, originated in the Paleogene (~34 Mya), while Central America and the Choc were recovered as the most plausible ancestral area for the actinomorphic-flowering clade (originated ~37 Mya). Since most of the species included in this reconstruction occur in the Amazon basin, and given the complexity of wetland habitats and their association with the Andean uplift that most likely had an important role in the evolution of Amazonian Lecythidaceae, increasing sampling from the InterAndean Valleys and Choc will allow us to better understand the niche evolution and diversification history of this family.