Evolution of Australia's globally unique hotspot of floral diversity

Understanding the processes that have generated the world's biodiversity is a major challenge of evolutionary biology. Plants and animals are currently distributed unevenly around the world, and this project will test the relative roles of evolutionary history and ecological constraints in determining these global asymmetries. Using the iconic eucalypts and representative biota, we will contrast the global biodiversity hotspot of southwest Western Australia with the latitudinally comparable southeast of Australia to determine the processes responsible for species generation and biodiversity maintenance. We will base this analysis on the first-ever phylogeny relating all species of eucalypts, by using next-generation genomic sequencing.