A team at the Florida Museum is studying how a group of Mediterranean herbs called bellflowers evolved and diversified to illuminate human history in the Mediterranean over the last several thousand years. They will combine a new archaeological dataset of human activity in the region with genetic data to determine the relationships between bellflower species, when and where they originated, and how human activity has altered their diversity and distribution.

“We intuitively know that landscapes have been … transformed by humans, but we don’t know exactly how these changes have affected the distribution of different lineages of plants and animals,” says researcher Nico Cellinese. Bellflowers are perfect “tracers” because they diversified throughout the Mediterranean before the arrival of humans, tend to have narrow distributions, and do not have direct agricultural applications.

• Nico Cellinese