ID: 613 / 39

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: APPLICATIONS OF SPECTRAL REFLECTANCE IN PLANT SYSTEMATICS AND EVOLUTION

Abstract: The challenge of circumscribing global biodiversity combined with the urgency of preserving it drives the development of innovative tools for identifying species and understanding their evolutionary ecology. Measuring spectral reflectance of leaf tissues across visual and infrared wavelengths (350–2,500 nm) with a full-range, portable spectrometer conveys integrated information about their anatomical structure, chemistry, and physiology. When applied in statistical and machine-learning based models, spectral reflectance provides significant power to discriminate species and taxa, estimate leaf traits, and identify molecules and metabolites with important functional or micro or macro evolutionary attributes. Studies also focus on identifying the phylogenetic signal and variability across different spectral regions and clades, and using these patterns to understand the evolutionary dynamics underlying leaf traits. Advances in spectral reflectance are being propelled by new analytical tools and datasets, especially for understanding the utility of herbarium collections. Collections present an exciting resource to rapidly generate voucher-based spectral libraries with broad applications, but the challenges posed by tissue degradation and spectral contamination by glue and paper remain crucial and active areas of investigation for evaluating their utility. The goal of our symposium will be to introduce the field of spectral reflectance to a broad audience and highlight diverse applications that demonstrate and guide expansion of these innovative phenomic data to study ecological and evolutionary processes at micro or macro scales. Our symposium will be relevant to a broad audience because of its innovative nature, investigation of herbaria as a source of biodiversity data, and overall power to understand plant diversity and evolution.

Speaker 1: Speaker: Paola Santacruz Endara Affiliation: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Ecuador) & IRD Email: paolasantacruzendara@gmail.com Talk title: The evolution of species specific spectra in a diverse genus of Neotropical trees (Guatteria, Annonaceae).

Speaker 2: Speaker: Barbara Neto-Bradley Affiliation: Cambridge University Email: bmn28@cam.ac.uk Talk title: Classifying stone oaks (Lithocarpus) in herbaria with reflectance spectra

Speaker 3: Speaker: José Eduardo Meireles Affiliation: University of Maine Email: jose.meireles@maine.edu Talk title: Plant diversity shows its true colors: Leveraging leaf spectra to understand the diversity and evolution of plant form and function.

Topics (Up to three): Bioinformatics

Topic 2: Phylogenetics and Phylogenomics

Topic 3: Systematics

Justification: Our symposium will bring together different ICB2024 topics, namely Bioinformatics (2), Ecology (10), Macroevolution (19), Physiology (23), Phylogenetics and Phylogenomics (22), and Plant, Animal, Microbe interactions (24). The symposium will be of interest to a wide audience because it targets a nascent, innovative and high-throughput phenomic methodology to study the diversity and evolution of plants, especially through the use of herbarium specimens. We will select a balance between gender, global south and north, early and advanced career level and as well geographic origin of the speakers.