Andy Murdock
General Interests:
- Fern systematics and evolution
- Genome evolution and resolution of deep nodes in the green tree of life
- Ethnobotany and ethnopteridology
- Pacific Island pteridophytes and general floristics
- California floristics and habitat conservation
Current Projects:
- Systematics of marattioid ferns (Dissertation Research)
- My dissertation research is focusing on the marattioid ferns, an early-branching
lineage of the ferns with no close living relatives. I am in the process
of constructing the first sequence-based phylogeny of the lineage using
plants collected by myself in the field and sent to me from all over the
world. More detail available on the Dissertation page.
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- Green Tree of
Life
- I am currently working with the NSF funded Green Tree of Life project
1) compiling a comprehensive morphological matrix for land plants, and
2) assembling and annotating whole chloroplast and mitochondrial genome
sequences for select target taxa across the green tree of life.
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- Flora of the Carquinez Strait Region
- I am in the final year of this project with collaborator Dean Kelch
collecting and writing the flora of the Carquinez Strait Region, a nearby
but surprisingly under-botanized area.
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- Moorea Digital
Flora Project
- An ongoing project with collaborator Anya Hinkle, the Moorea Digital
Flora Project is an online resource on the flora of Moorea, French Polynesia,
where UC Berkeley has a field station, the Richard
B. Gump South Pacific Research Station