Speciation of endemic plant species in Hengduan Mountains

Zili Yuan has a doctoral project to explore the impact of the geological and climatic history of the Hengduan Mountains on plant endemism. He will explore patterns and hotspots of plant endemism to understand the potential processes shaping the high degree of endemism in this region, and the exact mechanisms of speciation which formed the local plant endemism. He will reconstruct the phylogenies of representative local clades and analyse them based on sister species’ occurrences.