2024 Faculty - Kritika M. Garg

Brief About the Session :

Natural history museums and role in biodiversity and evolutionary studies

Natural history museum collections are important repositories of the diversity and distribution of biodiversity across time and space. They are critical for advancement across various fields like biodiversity discovery, ecological and evolutionary assessments, conservation, and the effects of climate change. Through collections built over centuries, these repositories preserve the record of biodiversity both in physical form across a vast temporal scale and as information like species identity, geographical distribution, and time of collection. Museum collections are the only resource to study extinct species and assess biodiversity of geographical regions that are difficult to explore. For extinct species like quagga and Tasmanian tiger, museum collections were the only source of genetic data. Due to the rapid advancements in the generation of genomic data from century old specimens, we are currently observing a revival in usage of natural history collections for evolutionary biology research. In this module, we will learn how natural history collections are used to study the impact of climate change on biodiversity and the evolution of vertebrates. Using already published data from museum repositories, we will investigate the

1. Impact of recent climate change on body size We will use published body size data from both insects and vertebrates collected over the last century to understand the changes in mean body size and the correlation between body size and temperature.

2. Impact of past climate change on genetic diversity and speciation In this module, we will use published sequence data from museum and archeological samples to investigate the loss of genetic diversity over time and the role of climate change on population divergence and speciation.

Career :