Newly developed and established methods will be integrated to complete a comprehensive study of the genus Protium (in the plant family Burseraceae, which includes frankincense and myrrh), revising the taxonomy of all 183 currently published species and describing all 52 remaining unpublished species. Protium represents one of the most important tree genera in the Americas. In Amazonia, Protium includes more than 125 species, and it serves as an excellent model system to understand the processes underlying the origins and maintenance of tropical tree diversity. New field collections in six countries will complement existing informative specimens of Protium for morphological and molecular studies that will identify and characterize all the species. Cutting-edge genomic approaches will be used to understand how each species is related to each other and the evolutionary history of the diversification in the group. New taxonomic tools such as leaf architecture (to find fingerprint-like leaf vein patterns) and near-infrared (NIR) spectral signatures, which quantifies light reflectance of dried leaves, will be integrated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to develop an interactive, image-driven, multi-access electronic key to all species that will be available online. The wealth of knowledge about species and traits that will be integrated by this project will help make tropical forests more understood and better protected. Moreover, this work will be conducted as part of a training program for tropical plant systematics. Training modern taxonomists is one of the most urgent priorities for tropical biology and conservation. New systematists will be trained who can build on foundations of fieldwork and a solid background of traditional plant anatomy and morphology, but also become experts in genomics, bioinformatics, web-based interactive keys, and NIR spectroscopy, so that they can become leaders in tropical botany for the rest of this century. This project will train two PhD students and one postdoctoral scholar and give several undergraduate interns the foundation to enter the field– a small but mighty investment in the future of tropical botany.
This project will contribute both a taxonomic monograph and a complete phylogeny of Protium (Burseraceae), one of the largest and most important clades of tropical trees. New field work in poorly documented regions of Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, and Guyana will be conducted to collect silica-dried leaf material and highly informative herbarium specimens and integrated with previously collected material. The project will use hybrid enrichment sequencing (Hyb-Seq), an approach using targeted sequence capture strategies with probes designed to capture low copy nuclear loci. Use of Hyb-Seq will produce a fossil-calibrated comprehensive phylogeny of the genus Protium. Leveraging this information with data on relative abundance and functional traits of Protium will lead to an increased understanding of the factors that influence commonness and rarity in tropical forests, a critical focus of conservation strategies. A growing track record of success with Protium as a model organism in developing and applying leaf architecture, NIR spectrometry, interactive keys, GIS mapping, and other resources for effective identification and characterization of trees should have profound implications for sustainable forest management and conservation.
This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.