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 [...]
The University of Cyprus was founded in 1989 and admitted its first students in 1992. Within a short time, the University of Cyprus achieved international distinctions. Today, it is ranked as the 89th best young university (under 50 years) and among the 401-500 best universities worldwide by the Times Higher Education Rankings. These notable [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Understanding the impacts of global change on organisms and ecosystems requires data and models that represent ecologically-relevant conditions. Here we will provide a hands-on coding workshop to understand microclimate data, and use R packages (e.g. NicheMapR, microclimf, TrenchR) to mechanistically predict microclimate anywhere on the terrestrial planet. This will include retrieving remote sensing data [...]
Understanding the mechanisms underlying the distribution of biodiversity lies at the core of macroecology and biogeography. To more accurately characterize how organisms experience and interact with their environment, biogeographers can now integrate microclimate models and biophysical models with Species Distribution Models (SDM). This workshop will present software for microclimate and biophysical modeling by working [...]
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 [...]
