Understanding diversity patterns, speciation, and biogeography of shallow-water marine organisms in the Atlantic realm (MarDivA)

This project builds and strengths capacities on areas of major relevance in biodiversity research, natural history museology, and societal concern, such as, the inventorying and conservation of global marine biological diversity, the origin and extinction of life in the Ocean and its connections with historical and current climatic events, using the gastropod genus Haminoea as model organisms. The primary objective of MarDivA is to understand the time and processes underlying the origin and diversification of Atlantic shallow-water species. A multidisciplinary approach using morpho-anatomical data, phylogenetic inference based on mitochondrial genomes, will be combined with biogeographic, oceanographic, and historical climatic data, as a proxy to answer questions about the diversity and distribution of species, time, mode, and geography of speciation.