1st Place: Phylogeography of the Mojave giant tiger beetle

The Mojave giant tiger beetle, Amblycheila schwarzi Horn, 1904 is a flightless beetle that is endemic to the American southwest. Its low vagility and high endemism make A. schwarzi an excellent subject for testing biogeographic hypotheses such as the Mojave Assembly Model, which proposes that Mojave endemic taxa were separated by the Bouse Embayment, an aquatic incursion that occurred between ~9-4 Ma. If the population structure of A. schwarzi indicates support for the hypothesis, clades should show a split east and west of the Colorado River and north and south in the Sonoran desert. To test support for this biogeographic model, specimens were collected from the known distribution (including museum specimens) and genomic data will be used to infer phylogeny.