Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: YACOV KILSZTAJN

Uma banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : YACOV KILSZTAJN
DATE: 01/09/2025
TIME: 09:00
LOCAL: Google Meet (https://meet.google.com/wmj-ajxd-bzr)
TITLE:

EXPLORING TRAIT EVOLUTION AND HABITAT-SHIFTS IN NEOTROPICAL MYRTACEAE

KEY WORDS:

biome-shifts; climatic niche; pre-adaptation; shrinkage effect.

PAGES: 35
BIG AREA: Ciências Biológicas
AREA: Ecologia
SUMMARY:

Plants occurring in similar environments often exhibit similar functional traits, indicating possible morphological convergences. However, plants are not always fully adapted to the environments they inhabit. These adaptive “incongruences” allow us to test whether, upon transitioning to new environments, lineages already possessed pre-adapted traits (i.e., traits that facilitate colonization) or whether they adapted afterward. It is expected that vegetative traits, related to plant establishment, will exhibit a pre-adaptation pattern, whereas reproductive traits, related to proliferation, will show an adaptive response after the transition to a new environment. In this dissertation, we test this hypothesis using the Neotropical lineage of the family Myrtaceae as a model, aiming to understand the evolutionary strategies that enabled the occupation of different environments in the Neotropics. In Chapter I, we evaluated the correlation between functional traits and the environment of occurrence in 678 Myrtaceae species; for those correlated traits, we tested whether they exhibited a pattern of adaptation or pre-adaptation. Functional traits were obtained from herbarium specimens and field expeditions, and comparative phylogenetic methods were employed using a recently published phylogeny for the group. Additionally, to validate the use of morphological data obtained from herbarium specimens as a representation of ecological functional traits in plants, in Chapter II we compared measurements of fresh and dried material for 115 Myrtaceae species. Preliminary results indicate that both vegetative and reproductive traits exhibit patterns of adaptation and pre-adaptation, depending on the direction of environmental transitions. We found that measurements obtained from herbarium specimens are good predictors of field measurements, although distinct correction factors should be applied depending on the type of plant structure and study group. We expect this dissertation to contribute not only to the understanding of the processes that shaped the diversification of Myrtaceae in the Neotropics but also to a broader comprehension of the history of Neotropical flora.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Externo à Instituição - EDUARDO KOERICH NERY - UFSC
Interno - 1103317 - KEMAL ALI GER
Presidente - 3058386 - VANESSA GRAZIELE STAGGEMEIER