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 [...]
Megafaunal diets reveal top-down mechanisms of ecological resilience on the Pleistocene mammoth steppe While there is a growing appreciation of the role that large herbivores play in structuring plant communities and confering ecological resilience at broad spatial scales, empirical tests of these ideas remain rare, especially in deep time. In this [...]
Anthropogenic disassembly of mammal communities past and present Understanding the relative importance of the processes driving the assembly and disassembly of ecological communities is important for basic and applied ecology. In this talk, I will focus on the role of humans in community disassembly. Specifically, I will address historical human impacts on mammal [...]
Functional Collapse: Reconstructing animal-vectored nutrient fluxes in paleoenvironments Centuries of human activity has led to declines in species’ ranges and abundances, but relatively little is know about the ecological functions of many species before human arrivals. One such function is animal-vectored nutrient fluxes – that is, the cross-ecosystem movement of [...]
Ecogeographical rules, such as Bergmann’s and Allen’s, are grounded in the physical principles of heat transfer. However, most studies have focused on their prevalence across species rather than their underlying mechanisms. A closer examination of the physics of heat and mass transfer in animals reveals new insights that enhance our mechanistic understanding of body [...]
Join us on Wednesday, January 29 at 10:00 pm UTC, for a talk by Dr. Jamie Wood. A core focus of biogeographical research is how climatic, geological and environmental factors influence the distribution of species on Earth. Yet interactions with other species, through processes such as competition, predation and parasitism, may also strongly influence [...]
