On the road to speciation: an integrated assessment of the evolution of reproductive isolation in a cryptic species complex

Understanding how new species arise has been one of the most ambitious goals of evolutionary biology ever since Darwin, yet also one of its most controversial subjects. 

Decades of research have shown that the acquisition of reproductive isolation between diverging entities (usually seen as the essence of speciation) is generally a gradual process and that there is a natural continuity in divergence from varieties or races to fully isolated species, with all sorts of intermediate situations. To understand how speciation occurs, one must thus not have a static view on species, but rather evaluate their continuous emergence in space and time. 

The main AIM of this proposal is to investigate the progression of reproductive isolation over time using a novel approach: the multidisciplinary study of contact zone dynamics between taxa that have diverged over different timescales.