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) [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
