Ricerc@Sapienza

Lace-DEVEX aims at reconstructing the evolutionary history of lacewings, assessing their rates of diversification and extinction, the impact of mass extinctions on their diversity, the loss of functional morphology during their evolutionary history and predicting their vulnerability during the ¿insect decline¿ biodiversity crisis. Lace-DEVEX will frame the phylogenetic and morphological diversity of lacewings in relation to past and present environmental changes and challenges. Lacewings are a small insect clade characterized by long evolutionary history, extensive fossil record and remarkable past and present functional diversity, making them ideal test subjects to reconstruct how they withstood past biodiversity crises and how they will fare in our changing world. A better insight in the evolutionary trajectories of a key insect clade may help to shed light on the ecological traits that were the basis of the evolutionary success of these organisms, which are still poorly understood. Our understanding of the impact of mass extinctions on insect diversity exclusively rely on our knowledge of the fossil record, which is often incomplete. The rampant biodiversity crisis is paying a toll on insect diversity with a potential serious ecological impact. However, how insects will face these challenges and which functional groups are more likely to be lost are still unanswered questions. Unveiling the past events affecting insect evolutionary history may lead to predicting which impacts they will withstand in the future. We will build up an extensive multidisciplinary dataset of lacewing diversity including phylogenetic, morpho-functional and paleontological data, that we will analyze by means of a solid phylogenetic backbone. We will investigate the diversification and extinction events, with emphasis on the loss of functional diversity, assessing the extinction risks for extant ecomorphotypes.