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Ongoing Dissertation Project
The cerrado and campos rupestres of Brazil have extremely high levels of plant diversity and endemism but the origins of this diversity are not well understood. For my dissertation, I am studying the diversification and niche evolution of Tibouchina s.s. (Melastomataceae), investigating the geographic and ecological factors driving diversification. This clade contains ~30 species, including many from the cerrado and campos rupestres. |
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I have dabbled in community phylogenetics. I have studied the effects that taxon sampling and tree reconstruction methods can have on measures of phylogenetic diversity using a case study of 14 plant communities at the Ordway-Swisher Biological Station in north-central Florida.
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For my MSc research project, I studied the systematics and biogeography of Coelocarpum (Verbenaceae), which is a small genus of 8 species from Socotra, Madagascar and Somalia. Using several plastid loci, we found that this genus is paraphyletic, with the Malagasy species forming a clade sister to a clade containing the remaining species of Coelocarpum and Lantaneae. This work remains unpublished due to the need for additional molecular support for our findings.
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While volunteering at the UVIC herbarium, I conducted a morphometric study of Phragmites australis (Poaceae) to determine whether morphological differentiation exists that corresponds to the native and invasive haplotypes growing in BC. My work was published as part of a larger project looking at the distribution and morphology of invasive and native haplotypes of P. australis in BC (Canada).
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