Marcel Cardillo: current research topics

Legacy of Gondwana: Evolutionary history and conservation of an iconic Australian plant group

Grevilleoideae is the largest subfamily of the great Gondwanan plant family Proteaceae, and includes around 1000 species that have diversified into an amazing variety of forms and occupy most ecosystem types across Australia. We aim to reconstruct the phylogeny of Grevilleoideae using Anchored Hybrid Enrichment, and use this to explore the legacy that evolutionary history has left for present-day conservation.

The project is funded by ARC Discovery Grant DP200102927, and is being carried out in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney and Florida State University. Chief Investigator is Marcel Cardillo, and Partner Investigators are Hervé Sauquet, Peter Weston and Austin Mast.
Grevillea batrachioides, a Critically Endangered species endemic to Western Australia

Phylogeny, biogeography and diversification of Australian plants

Mediterranean-climate regions, such as Australia’s southwest, often have spectacular botanical diversity, despite poor soils and low rainfall, and the underlying causes are still not well understood. We are focusing on the diverse Australian plant family Proteaceae (which includes such iconic genera as Banksia, Hakea and Grevillea) to explore plant diversification processes generally, and the diversity of Australia's southwest corner in particular. We are using anchored hybrid enrichment genomic data to construct species-level phylogenies for some of these genera, and by combining these with spatial and ecological data, we are exploring questions such as:
  • are rates of diversification higher in southwest Australian lineages?
  • does phylogenetic niche conservatism contribute to the high diversity of Mediterranean-type environments?
  • how frequently have evolutionary shifts between biomes occurred?

This research program has been funded by various ARC Discovery grants over the past decade. Collaborating institutions include Florida State University and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.
Reconstructed biome shifts in Hakea. (Cardillo et al 2017, Evolution 71:1928-1943)

Evolution at extremes: Macroevolutionary responses to harsh environments

The Australian landscape presents many areas of extreme conditions for plant survival, such as drought, heat, or salt-affected soils. Are some lineages better able to adapt, persist and diversify in these harsh conditions? This project aims to develop new phylo-spatial methods to identify lineages most tolerant of extreme environments, detect enabling traits that contribute to stress resistance syndromes, and explore the processes of community assembly in harsh environments. Taking a macroevolutionary approach to understanding the evolution of tolerance may allow us to predict which lineages, species or communities are likely to be able to adapt to the increasing extreme conditions expected under global environmental change.

This project is funded by ARC Discovery Grant DP160103915. Chief Investigators are Lindell Bromham and Marcel Cardillo, and Xia Hua is employed as a postdoc. Collaborating institutions include the Atlas of Living Australia.

Ecological processes in evolutionary radiations

Adaptive radiation theory predicts links between ecological processes that occur at small scales (such as interspecific competition) and macroevolutionary patterns of diversification and niche evolution through time. We are building computational models that simulate the adaptive radiation process to clarify these links, then testing them empirically using genomic and spatial data for Australian Proteaceae, and other groups including birds and mammals.

This project is funded by ARC Discovery Grant DP160100574. Marcel Cardillo is Chief Investigator, and Russell Dinnage is employed as a postdoc on the project.

Extinction risk in the world’s mammals

Why do some species become threatened with extinction while others remain safe, even when they are exposed to similar threatening processes? To answer this question we need to explore phylogenetic and spatial patterns of species threat status, their associations with threatening processes (such as habitat loss or invasive predators), and the way these associations are mediated by the species biology and the environments they inhabit. We apply large-scale, phylogenetic comparative tests to large species databases to investigate patterns and correlates of threat status.

This is an ongoing research interest in our group, rather than a specific funded project.

Global patterns of biodiversity

Surprisingly, many large-scale patterns of biodiversity (such as the latitudinal diversity gradient) are still poorly understood. We use large, global-scale databases of the distributions and phylogenies of mammals and birds to test hypotheses about the underlying causes of global biodiversity patterns.

This is not a specific, funded project, but an ongoing research interest in the Macroevolution & Macroecology Group.