February 2026 Funk Biogeography Seminar — Juan Pablo Quimbayo

Under construction! The next installment of the Funk Biogeography Seminar series will take place on February 25th. Check back soon for more information! Registration TBA About the speaker: More information coming soon! In the meantime, check out: University of Miami profile Google [...]

January 2026 Funk Biogeography Seminar — Pedro Peres-Neto

Ecology & Evolution in Spatial Structured Environments Ecological and evolutionary dynamics occur in environments that are intrinsically spatially structured, yet spatial environmental heterogeneity is often treated as a statistical complication (e.g., a nuisance term to be removed, a source of spatial autocorrelation to be corrected, or variance to be averaged out) [...]

2026 Dissertation Awardee

The research of Aliaga Samanez spans biogeography, conservation biology, species distribution modeling, and public health. By integrating biogeography with disease ecology, she addresses urgent global challenges related to infectious disease prevention in an increasingly interconnected world. Her findings provide a foundation for informed decision-making in habitat management and disease surveillance strategies. Her focus on [...]

2026-01-06T06:19:12-05:00Categories: Awards, Featured, Misc posts, News|

2026 MacArthur & Wilson Awardee

Daru’s research leverages herbarium specimens as untapped sources of plant functional traits to explore shifting functional biogeography across ecological scales. His recent work on seagrasses, being the only flowering plants to secondarily transition to sea during the early evolution of monocots, which moves his research from patterns of plant distributions to the underlying [...]

2026-01-06T09:03:10-05:00Categories: Awards, Featured, News|

2026 Alfred Russel Wallace Awardee

Mark Lomolino has made important contributions to island biogeography, especially to the concepts ‘habitat corridors’, ’small island effect’, and the species-area relationships. His dedicated support for The International Biogeography Society, including a profound role in the Society’s founding 25 years ago (around the year 2000), and his coauthoring of a foundational textbook of [...]

2026-01-06T09:04:37-05:00Categories: Awards, Featured, Misc posts, News|

2026 Alfred Russel Wallace Awardee

Michael Donoghue's conceptual creativity and impact in the field of biogeography, specifically his role in bringing “tree-thinking” to biogeography and in fostering connections between the phylogenetics community and researchers in historic biogeography, cannot overstated: His research and new ways of thinking have left an indelible legacy that has been carried forward by Michael’s [...]

2026-01-06T09:06:46-05:00Categories: Awards, Featured, Misc posts, News|

November 2025 Funk Biogeography Seminar — Laura Pollock

Mind the Wallacean Gap: What is our strategy for improving biogeographic data? What we don't know about biogeographic data is very well-known. Studies routinely demonstrate what feels like an impossible task of filling the vast cavern of data deficiency known as the Wallacean shortfall. But what is it we really [...]

October 2025 Funk Biogeography Seminar — Brett Scheffers

Scaling Down to Scale Up: The Role of Micro in Biogeography Complex forest vegetation creates steep vertical gradients in climate, habitat, and resources that rival or exceed those found across elevation and latitude. These microgeographic gradients offer a powerful model to understand how abiotic and biotic interactions structure communities. In [...]

September 2025 Funk Biogeography Seminar — Brian McGill

Species ranges: fundamental ecological units or intractable complexity? Several have argued that the geographic range of a species is a fundamental unit of biogeography and more generally of ecology. Certainly, the distribution of a species, and the fact that all species show distributional limits, is a critical fact. Others have [...]

July 2025 Funk Biogeography Seminar — Mario R. Moura

Uncovering the Blind Spots in Biodiversity Data The gaps in our understanding of biodiversity have long been recognized as a critical challenge. These knowledge shotfalls can distort our perception of biodiversity and bias fundamental estimates—from the total number of species to complex patterns of rarity and threats to biodiversity. On [...]

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