Phylodiversity in the Mojave National Preserve

In collaboration with Blueprint Earth, I am working on a project to understand the phylogenetic diversity of vascular plants in a 1 km x 1 km, densely surveyed region of the Mojave National Preserve. The study area is home to springs with both underground and surface flow and basalt flows, creating a hydrogeologically complex area. We are testing the hypothesis that environmental heterogeneity supports phylogenetic diversity in the Mojave Desert. This project would not be possible without UC Berkeley recent graduate and research intern Dean Berkowitz, who really took charge of the project and made it his own. You can see his github repository, including preliminary results, here.