ID: 613 / 83

Category: Symposia

Track: Pending

Proposed Symposium Title: BIOGEOGRAPHIC AND EVOLUTIONARY PATTERNS AND PROCESSES OF THE TROPICAL - TEMPERATE BIOME TRANSITION

Abstract: The evolutionary patterns and processes driving ecological transitions between biomes are complex and remain poorly understood in plants. Studying plant groups that underwent tropical-temperate transitions offers an excellent opportunity to study the historical assembly of temperate forests and the development of subtropical biodiversity, understand morphological/phenomic changes associated with the biome shifts, and explore the patterns of diversification and biogeographic history accompanying biome shifts. We propose a symposium to bring together evolutionary biologists, biogeographers, systematists, paleobotanists, and ecologists to explore tropical-temperate transitions. The symposium will address diversification rate changes associated with biome shifts, as well as the complex biogeographic patterns of plant lineages showing tropical to temperate transitions, explore recently developed tools such as machine learning for the automated capture of morphological data from digitized herbarium specimens, and investigate the processes enabling tropical-temperate transitions using paleobotanical and ecological evidence. We anticipate this symposium will stimulate multidisciplinary collaborative research to further study the evolutionary processes and diversification rate changes shaping biome shifts due to climatic changes. Such a symposium at the XX International Botanical Congress is especially timely, as the discussion and debate in this symposium will be of interest by a broad community of plant biologists studying a diverse array of plant lineages, and will have profound implications on our understanding of the assembly of vast temperate forest diversity and its conservation at a critical time in the Anthropocene. The symposium will strive to recruit early-career speakers with diverse academic backgrounds and emphasize equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Speaker 1: Name: Zelong Nie Institutional Affiliation: College of Biology and Environmental Sciences, Jishou University, Jishou, Hunan, China Email: niez@jsu.edu.cn Tentative talk Title: Boreotropical survival and subsequent temperate radiations characterize the diversification of woody flowering plants in the Northern Hemisphere

Speaker 2: Name: Richard Hodel Institutional Affiliation: Department of Botany & Data Science Lab, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA Email: hodelr@si.edu Tentative talk Title: Machine learning analyses of herbarium specimens identify morphological features characterizing tropical to temperate transitions

Speaker 3: Name: Tao Su Institutional Affiliation: Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Yunnan, China Email: sutao@xtbg.org.cn Tentative talk Title: The modernization of plant diversity on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau associated with the Late Eocene tropical to temperate transition

Topics (Up to three): Biogeography / Phylogeography

Topic 2: Bioinformatics

Topic 3: Phylogenetics and Phylogenomics

Justification: The proposed symposium on the biogeographic and evolutionary patterns and processes associated with tropical – temperate biome shifts has emerging importance for understanding biotic changes associated with a changing climate. The symposium will bridge several IBC themes, e.g., Biogeography/Phylogeography, Bioinformatics, Global Change Ecology, Paleobotany/Archaeobotany, and Phylogenetics/Phylogenomics. It hence has great potential to stimulate interdisciplinary research on the complexity of biotic evolution and biogeographic assembly, and bears important implications on conserving our Planet at a critical time during the Anthropocene.