Coastal El Niño (CEN) events have affected the northern half of Peru's coast for millennia bringing very warm climate conditions that lead to heavy rainfall and floods. In the central Peruvian desert of Casma, the presence of numerous fortified settlements dating from around 320-200 BCE suggests that their construction occurred during a period of warfare and regional instability. However, the reasons behind this instability remain unclear. The larger of these fortresses, Chankillo, may hold the key to understand when and why these structures were built. Well-preserved wooden lintels in Chankillo’s structures provide an opportunity to study the environmental past. A preliminary tree-ring width study revealed an anomalous wide ring in timbers from the lintels just before Chankillo’s construction, which could be the result of a CEN-induced catastrophic episode of heavy rainfall. This extreme CEN may have sparked instability and warfare, shaping central Peruvian history around 2,300 years ago. PACHACUTI aims to determine whether a catastrophic CEN event took place around 320-200 BCE, before Chankillo’s construction, by combining dendroarchaeology, annually-resolved stable oxygen isotope (18O) analysis and radiocarbon wiggle-matching. This ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach will use samples from Chankillo’s architectural timbers to develop an 18O chronology capturing hydroclimate variability over the 120 years before Chankillo’s construction. This novel record will encapsulate the frequency, magnitude and impacts of past CEN events during this period, offering insights into the climatic context surrounding Chankillo’s origins. Furthermore, it will also serve to date other archaeological sites in the region. If proven, this discovery will reveal the oldest known CEN event with a significant societal impact, highlighting the need to improve mitigation strategies to reduce the impact of future extreme hydroclimatic events for modern societies.

By their own very nature, islands are natural laboratories where evolutionary outcomes seem to exceed the limits of imagination. Stubby and flightless birds, dwarf elephants and hippos, and giant mice are some of the bizarre examples. Those morphological modifications are not the result of random variation but are triggered by the specific ecological conditions of the islands (absence of terrestrial predators and low level of competition for food and space). In some occasions, these conditions do not lead to a particular shift in body size, but instead to a diversification event, resulting in a disparity of forms, such as the case of Darwin’s finches in Galapagos. The island of Crete (Greece) housed one such diversification, that of the enigmatic extinct Pleistocene deer. This genus (Candiacervus) evolved into eight species in six size groups, ranging from ~28 to ~245kg in body mass, in less than 1 million years. In CREDE I will explore this unusual disparity of body size in Cretan deer to understand the evolutionary mechanisms behind species radiations in mammals. Despite advances over the years in knowledge on this lineage, mainly focusing on dwarf or giant species, we know little about the factors underpinning this level of diversity. In CREDE I will employ my expertise in deer bone histology together with the novel application of 3D image analysis to examine bone microstructure of Cretan deer, and thus, obtain data about their life strategies (age at maturity, pace of growth, longevity). Moreover, the use of stable isotope will provide new integrative data on the ecological and dietary preferences of the different species. Finally, the combination of both approaches will shed light on diversification of mammal lineages on a macroevolutionary scale, presenting a comprehensive framework for interpreting mammalian evolution.

Sailors called it “burning of the sea”, Shakespeare described it as “pale fire” and Aristotle named it “cold light”. The glimmer they witnessed was light emitted by living organisms or bioluminescence. While it represents one of the most striking examples of convergent evolution across the tree of life, in Fungi it has a single origin in the Agaricales order, Basidiomycota. In particular, Mycena, a large genus of mushroom-forming fungi, includes most of known bioluminescent species together with hundreds of species that lost the ability to emit light. In GLiMMer, I will study the evolution of fungal bioluminescence and test the hypothesis that multiple, lineage-specific mechanisms led to the convergent loss of this trait, providing clues for its ecological relevance. To date, Mycena lacks a robust phylogenetic framework and is heavily under sampled. Fungarium collections, such as the one at Naturalis, preserved thousands of Mycena specimens over the past centuries. Thanks to new high-throughput sequencing methods these collections are being transformed in genomics resources, bridging taxonomy and evolution. In GLiMMer, my expertise in fungal genomics will serve to develop a genome-based classification of Mycena, that combines contemporary and museum specimens. I will generate assemblies of 100 representative species using short-read sequencing. Next, I will extract phylogenetically informative loci to design a target sequence capture method for recalcitrant museum specimens for the first time in mushrooms. Then, I will use the new classification to select reference species and obtain chromosomal-level assemblies using long-read sequencing. Finally, with genome-wide synteny analyses I will investigate the evolutionary circumstances that led to the birth and death of bioluminescence in Fungi. By integrating taxonomy, genomics and evolution, my project will create a paradigm shift in our knowledge on fungal biodiversity and ultimately contribute to its conservation.

Large-scale ocean changes, including ocean acidification (OA) and ocean warming (OW), are projected to occur over the next 50-100 years as a result of elevated atmospheric CO2. Living close to the atmosphere/ocean boundary, plankton are particularly vulnerable to, but also excellent indicators of these changes. Euthecosome pteropods (small swimming gastropods) have been highlighted as bio-indicators because their delicate aragonite shells are susceptible to OA. However complex feeding behaviours have impeded laboratory experiments on pteropods, limiting research to short term studies. The proposed action will apply an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the past, present and future effects of OA and OW upon the planktonic family Atlantidae, and to evaluate their use as bio-indicators. Atlantid heteropods are also small (max. 14 mm), aragonite shelled, planktonic gastropods that are sensitive to OA and OW. Unlike pteropods, atlantids are predatory and have the potential to be excellent experimental organisms with which to investigate the effects of these surface ocean changes. Atlantids also provide a unique opportunity to investigate the effect of OA and OW at an as-yet unstudied and potentially more sensitive trophic level. The Experienced Researcher has worked with atlantids for >8 years and is one of very few researchers able to identify atlantid species. As such, she is uniquely positioned to deliver the objectives of this interdisciplinary project. The proposed research will provide opportunities for the Researcher to advance her career and skill-set through specialist training and teaching opportunities. The proposed action will improve our appreciation of how surface ocean changes will affect zooplankton and produce high impact data that are relevant to a wide body of marine scientists. The atlantids are also beautiful, charismatic gastropods, and excellent ambassadors for engaging the public and policy makers with current ocean changes.

One of the most drastic impacts of man on Earth is species extinctions. We do not know how many species are extinct and how many will go extinct, but we may be experiencing a sixth mass extinction. Thus, actions to help protect species from extinction are urgently needed. These actions should be prioritized in biomes such as tropical forests that shelter enormous biodiversity but have increasingly been impacted. One example is the Atlantic Forest in South America. It shelters around 5% of world species, half of them being endemic. But 86% of its original extent has already been lost and only about 1% is effectively protected. To support the protection of the Atlantic Forest, this proposal has the following goals: (i) to assess the threat status of endemic Atlantic Forest trees (EAFT) based on all criteria of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), (ii) to quantify the evolutionary uniqueness of globally threatened EAFT, (iii) provide guidelines to conserve threatened EAFT, including the identification of gaps of knowledge and priority areas for their conservation, and (iv) to involve the local society in species conservation through the proposal of a citizen science program. The proposed action is perfectly aligned with targets of the United Nations Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation 2011-2020 and the IUCN Global Tree Specialist Group. It is multi-disciplinary with both scientific and applied components. It combines large datasets with high-resolution maps, up-to-date modelling techniques and the expertises of researchers from four different countries. It will also provide new information that can be readily used by conservation agencies. Finally, it will engage different social actors to launch a conservation and educational program based on the involvement of local people.