The origin and fate of megadiversity: A look from the northern Andes

Northern South America harbors an extraordinary share of the world’s biological diversity, and explaining how that diversity came to be has long occupied biogeographers. This talk brings together two lines of work in my lab on how tropical organisms, mostly birds, evolve, interact, and respond to a changing world. I will begin with origins, discussing what phylogenetic and population genetic data, integrated with information on organismal ecology, reveal about the accumulation of species in tropical mountains, and considering how changes in landscapes and climate shape the distributions of species and influence their diversification. Although most of my examples come from birds, I will also draw on work in my lab on other organisms and systems, among them fishes in Colombian caves and plants distributed along elevational ranges. I will then turn to change, describing the Colombia Resurvey Project, in which we revisit places sampled by naturalists generations ago. Historical collections and modern resurveys serve as windows across time, and reading one against the other lets us ask whether we are conserving the ecological and evolutionary processes that sustain biodiversity.

About the speaker: I am a naturalist, evolutionary biologist, and professor at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. I study how species evolve, adapt, and diversify, especially in the tropics. Much of my work focuses on birds (and, currently, cave-dwelling fish), and I combine fieldwork, genomics, museum collections, and ecological modeling to explore the origins of biodiversity and how it is shaped by geography, climate, and evolutionary history.

​Over the years, our group has published on topics ranging from natural history, adaptation, and speciation to various aspects of biogeography, the ecology and evolution of animal migration, and biodiversity conservation. One of our main projects at present is a national biodiversity survey that retraces the paths of early naturalists to understand how Colombia’s birds have responded to a century of environmental and cultural change.

In my role as Dean of the School of Sciences at UniAndes, I work with an extraordinary academic community committed to transforming lives through science. I’m passionate about sharing knowledge beyond academia and using science to help build more sustainable and equitable futures.