Phylogenetic models of historical biogeography Fully understanding how any species evolved involves knowing where it lived. As the complete biogeographic history for most lineages cannot be directly observed, biologists often use phylogenetic models to reconstruct ancestral species ranges and to infer regional rates of dispersal, speciation, and extinction. This talk will [...]
Forecasting like a climate scientist - predicting biodiversity change in the Anthropocene Biodiversity and ecosystems are degrading worldwide in response to multiple anthropogenic pressures. Yet, our ability to anticipate these changes remains limited. Current approaches are largely retrospective, making it difficult to evaluate future risks or the consequences of different [...]
Biodiversity patterns in environmental space Ever since Aristotle suggested that the distributions of organisms were related to environmental factors and Humboldt travelled the world observing dramatic differences in species richness depending on climate, scientists have been keenly aware that climate strongly influences the distribution and persistence of species on earth. Given [...]
Scaling Marine Biodiversity: Insights from a Trait-Based Framework Marine ecosystems are shaped by complex ecological and evolutionary processes that operate across spatial scales, from fine local gradients to broad biogeographical patterns. Capturing how biodiversity emerges from these drivers requires moving beyond traditional taxonomic approaches toward integrative frameworks that explicitly incorporate functional [...]
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) [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Addressing Wallacean shortfalls for understudied taxa with species distribution models There is now a wealth of open data on species distributions, but taxonomic biases in favor of charismatic species persist, leaving big gaps for distributional information in the tree of life. Known as Wallacean shortfalls, these gaps make it difficult [...]
