Objectives

Current hypotheses of seed plant relationships remain controversial and have been inferred from very limited sampling, while very few molecular phylogenetic studies at the specieslevel have been conducted in gymnosperms. Our results will address questions at all levels and will provide the comparative morphological data from across ALL gymnosperms necessary for a full exploration of the positions of extinct and living taxa in the Tree of Life.

“Gymnosperms on the tree of life” comprises four major components:

Molecules: phylogeny of all living species
•  We are assembling molecular matrices that represent every living species of gymnosperm.   Efforts to infer relationships among seed plants from molecular data have been based on very limited sampling of species, especially of gymnosperms.   Thus, we lack a comprehensive understanding of relationships within extant gymnosperm genera and families, and efforts to resolve deeper branches in the phylogeny of extant seed plants have been hampered by systematic error.   This is a relatively straightforward problem to address.   It is a matter of scaling up the sampling.

Morphology: integrated phylogeny of fossils and living taxa
•  We are assembling morphological matrices that include 180 living and 79 extinct gymnosperms.   Efforts to infer relationships from morphological data have been limited by the lack of comparable data sets from living and extinct taxa, disallowing their consideration in the same analyses.   Thus, we lack robust hypotheses of the true pattern of seed plant evolution.   This is a more challenging problem to address.   Whole plant reconstructions are laborious and time-consuming, but are the best sources of large character sets.   However, the effort is critical because integrative studies are often limited by the need for better characterization of extant taxa. 

Informatics
•  We are building our archive of taxonomic, geographical, morphological, and molecular data in TOLKIN (Tree of Life Knowledge and Information Network at www.tolkin.org).

Educational outreach
•  We are developing workshops and curricula for educators that demonstrate how locally accessible living collections can be used to teach science.