Grant: Alliance Grants

This project aims at combining biological and geological data to understand how changes in landmasses and seas induced the evolution of plants and animals using the Caribbean islands as a case study. We are particularly interested in understanding the evolution of life in archipelagoes located along subduction zones. Subduction zones are areas where tectonic plates overlap, with one plate sliding under the other, and they are important because they host one third of the world's biodiversity hotspots, therefore they are important to study and conserve. This project brings together an international team of academics from public universities mostly in France but also in Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and Mexico. The researchers are grouped into four working packages (WP) with the following objectives: WP1 will conduct phylogenetic and biogeographic analyses of Caribbean plants and animals. WP2 will conduct geological mapping, date emersion surfaces, quantify erosion rates and surface uplift to provide a chronology for land emergence and drowning during the last 30 million years. WP3 will conduct mumerical modeling of the vertical motions that control the land-sea mask to unravel the triggers and amplitude of the emersion and drowning events. The biological and geological results will be merged in WP4 testing alternative hypotheses of organisms' dispersal and evolution. The project will provide insight on the possible effects of climate change and associated sea-level changes on the migrations of plants and animals. The synergy achieved between geoscientists and evolutionary biologists in this international team will strengthen Canadian leadership on climate change research. Knowledge on how past landmass and seascape changes affected the movement and evolution of organisms is important to mitigate the current effects of climate change on biodiversity in Canada and globally.