BGG (Baja GeoGenomics)
While the boundaries of the Sonoran Desert and its subregions have been established, questions remain. How did the desert change over geological time? What is the imprint of those changes on modern day diversity? How will this change in the future?
Photo credit: John Doe
The Baja GeoGenomics consortium (BGG) aims to constrain how the physical landscape of the Baja California peninsula has changed over the past 6 million years, determine which of these changes have produced evolutionary genomic signals, and test how those signals differ among mammal, reptile, and plant species.
This collaborative research aims to resolve longstanding biogeographic puzzles of the Sonoran Desert, such as whether current disjunct distributions of species represent locations where the desert survived through the wetter Pleistocene. This synthetic understanding will help define how populations are responding to climate change today, both through genetic evolution and spatial movement, and help forecast future trajectories.
For more information please see: https://bajageogenomics.org/
Dolby, G.A. S.E.K Bennett, R.J. Dorsey, M. Stokes, B.R. Riddle, A. Lira-Noriega, A. Munguia-Vega, B.T. Wilder. 2022. Integrating Earth-life systems: A geogenomics approach. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 37:371–384. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.12.004
