POLYGENOMES: A century of genomic erosion and adaptation in insect pollinators

Bees and butterflies are of ecological and economic importance because of their pollinator role for both wild plants and cultivated crops.

However, these groups have suffered dramatic population declines during the last century, with agricultural intensification and pesticide pollution considered among the leading threats. Yet, the evolutionary and genomic consequences of such declines are largely unexplored.

In this project, I will focus on three pivotal questions: 1) can we use genomics to gain insight into the role of human-driven environmental change in pollinator population declines? 2), how have population declines impacted the ability of pollinators to adapt to future environmental changes? and 3), have pollinators been able to adapt to past anthropogenic changes to the environment?

To address these, I propose to use the wealth of insect specimens in museum collections by sequencing the genomes of 2,000 individual bees and butterflies collected throughout Sweden.

We will use state-of-the-art and develop new, tailored palaeogenomic laboratory and computational methods to quantify changes in genomic diversity through time and space and to investigate whether these can be associated with major environmental changes caused by humans.

The results of this project can provide ground-breaking advances in our understanding of the role of human-driven environmental change in pollinator declines and deliver key insights into the evolutionary changes underpinning such a process.