20253MAX001 - Ampliando el proyecto HEALPHY y las fron

The general objective of HEALPHY is to implement eco-phylogenetic approaches for preserving, prospecting, and understanding the medicinal potential of plant biodiversity. The project includes three specific objectives stemming from the foundational idea that the evolutionary history of species provides a powerful framework for investigating how humans have interacted with their floristic environments in search of medicinal benefits. It has long been hypothesized that phylogenetically diverse samples of species should encompass a high diversity of human benefits, an idea that has recently received empirical support. These are promising advances, yet they represent only the first steps towards consolidating this theory as a novel macroevolutionary perspective on biodiversity conservation, particularly with regard to medicinal plants. Accordingly, the extent to which, and the reasons why, subsets of species representing high levels of phylogenetic diversity (PD) and evolutionarily distinct (ED) species may respectively capture a high diversity of traditional remedies remain unknown. The project will also expand the PD/plant-benefits analytical framework by developing more realistic null models to test the theory and incorporating the cultural importance of species, among other methodological advances. Early studies showed that some taxonomic families are overrepresented in ethnomedicinal floras, while more recent regional studies have mapped medicinal remedies onto molecular phylogenies to investigate these patterns in greater detail. However, results have remained largely inconclusive, suggesting the existence of idiosyncratic effects in human plant selection that are specific to individual regions and hinder the identification of general patterns. Here, we propose that cross-regional studies of plant remedies using molecular phylogenies could overcome this limitation and reveal whether certain lineages have been independently prospected in floristically unlinked regions by different human groups. Medicinal plant selection within regions may, in turn, be influenced by local cultural differences. However, the relative importance of cultural differentiation, geographic proximity among human groups, and the floristic environments available to them—that is, the pools of species that each group historically had the opportunity to prospect—remains unclear. In this project, we advocate for cross-scale analyses within and across floristic environments to elucidate the drivers of medicinal plant selection by different human groups. Different local cultures may use completely distinct sets of species that nevertheless show a high degree of phylogenetic relatedness. Such a pattern would indicate less divergent ethnomedicinal biodiversity than suggested by taxonomic information alone in conventional studies, highlighting the need to incorporate the phylogenetic dimension into more nuanced assessments. To achieve the goals of the project, we will focus on two megadiverse regions with contrasting biogeographic histories and exceptionally rich and well-documented ethnomedicinal floras: continental Spain and Ecuador