Lines of research

Graduate Program in Neotropical Biodiversity (PPG-BN) is organized in one area of concentration and two lines of research:

Area of Concentration: Neotropical Biodiversity
The area of biodiversity is focused on helping students describe biodiversity and carry out researches that aim at understanding their ecological and evolutionary relations, as well as their interactions with human beings, through different approaches, spatial scales of analysis and perspectives. Students shall improve their conceptual and methodological understanding of the area in order to become professors or work in research, and they shall also gain practical experience in the field, elaborating research projects, defining samples and experiments, and analyzing and processing data.

Line 1. Ecology
It aims at doing research on ecology of organisms, populations, biological communities and ecosystems in different spatial scales, in order to understand the processes which maintain biodiversity and the impacts on its conservation due to anthropic and natural disturbance. A deepening of the theoretical basis on ecology from an evolutionary perspective will be emphasized in order to develop researchers in this line of research, which will include an expanded experience in data collection in the field and its analysis, from an experimental or interpretative perspective in light of the ecological theory. The goal is to distinguish ecological factors and patterns from the historical ones. There will also be offered an in-depth basis for research outline and statistics. The knowledge of different analytical methods used in ecological studies will be emphasized, as well as the interaction with the line of research called Systematics and Evolution, due to the necessity to understand the current processes in a phylogenetic-evolutionary context.

Line 2. Systematics and Evolution
It aims at describing neotropical biodiversity, specially the one represented in Bacia do Paraná, and its evolutionary and distributional relations, at a interspecific and intraspecific level. This line of research includes studies of inventory, taxonomic reviews, phylogenetic and biogeographic relations. The interaction among different species and the environment must be investigated in a historical context. Processes which generate biodiversity and their relation to the history of the Neotropical region and the history of its biota may be studied by means of analytical methods applied to data from different biological groups. The theoretical and practical basis of systematic phylogenetics will be studied in order to develop researchers in this area, and so will be biological taxonomy, evolution, molecular diversity and historical biogeography.