The “bush tomatoes” (Solanum) of the Australian Monsoon Tropics continue to generate questions related to reproductive ecology, species boundaries, biogeography, and breeding systems evolution. This talk will summarize work done on this unusual group of plants in the Martine lab, often inclusive of undergraduate students, through a holistic research strategy that includes fieldwork, herbarium collections, greenhouse culture, and molecular approaches.

Documenting how Earth’s many ecosystems, each with unique combinations of climate, flora, and fauna, came to be is critical for understanding how ecosystems function today, and will function in the future. My lab’s research has focused largely on elucidating the Cretaceous-Cenozoic assembly of grassland ecosystems, which currently occupy 40% of Earth’s land surface and provide key agricultural products (e.g., corn, rice).