Abstract Detail

IAPT Early Career Investigator Program: Life at the Edge

Bonifacino, Mauricio [1], Livshultz, Tatyana [2].

IAPT Early Career Investigator Program: Life at the Edge.

The International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) supports scientific research in systematics of plants, fungi, and algae. This is the third symposium of a series sponsored by the IAPT to highlight the work of early career researchers. Taxa occupying evolutionarily novel habitats, whether these fit into our conventional concepts of extreme environments (e.g. deserts, mountaintops, polar regions) or are "extreme" only relative to the ancestral habitats of the lineage (e.g. forest canopy, land, endosymbiosis), must evolve new solutions to the challenges of survival and reproduction. Understanding how these taxa adapted to their novel niches and the impacts of this habitat shift on species biology and evolutionary processes offers a fascinating window on evolution: insight both into events of the past, and events we might anticipate as human-caused global change places more and more species into evolutionarily novel environments. This symposium will highlight research conducted in the fields of systematics and evolution of major clades of fungi and plants, focusing on how life has pushed the edge of what constitutes a habitable environment. Relevance: Justification for symposium topic Topics proposed in "IAPT Early Career Investigator Symposium: Life at the Edge" offer a window into how life deals with new habitats. This symposium was developed specifically to fit the meeting theme of "Sky Islands and Desert Seas".

1 - Universidad de la Republica, Facultade de Agronomia y Facultad de Ciencias, Uruguay
2 - Academy Of Natural Sciences Of Drexel University, Department Of Botany, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA, 19103, United States

Keywords:
evolution
adaptation
extreme environment
novelty
systematics
plants
fungi
algae.

Presentation Type:
Session: SYM6, IAPT Early Career Investigator Program: Life at the Edge
Location: Tucson E/Starr Pass
Date: Wednesday, July 31st, 2019
Time: 8:15 AM
Number: SYM6SUM
Abstract ID:28
Candidate for Awards:None