The most remarkable thing about our planet is that is supports life. And the most remarkable thing about life is its diversity. Although biodiversity estimates remain highly uncertain, recent studies suggest that Earth is home to more than 8 million Eukaryotic species and innumerable microscopic organisms. Our research team seeks to understand (1) the processes through which this biodiversity, both across and within species, has been generated, to understand (2) why biodiversity is so unevenly distributed across species and geographic space, and (3) how human activity is impacting the ecological and evolutionary processes that underpin the functioning of the biosphere and ultimately human society.
To address this, our research takes a macroscopic perspective, analysing the distribution and dynamics of biodiversity across large spatial, taxonomic and/or temporal scales. There has never been a better or more exciting time to address these questions. Centuries of collection efforts by naturalists, advances in genetic sequencing and remote sensing, and global citizen science initiatives, are now enabling scientists to map and characterise biodiversity at unprecedented scales and resolutions, providing detailed information on where each species lives on the planet, its ecological niche and its phylogenetic relationships. Through developing and applying computational models to large empirical datasets our research has revealed how many aspects of the dynamics of biodiversity, from bursts of speciation during adaptive radiations to the collapse of ecological communities, arise from constraints imposed by the physical environment that organisms occupy. While Hutchinson's evolutionary play is held in an ecological theatre, it is performed on a geographical stage.
These macroscopic patterns and processes ultimately arise from the behaviour and dynamics of individual organisms, how they distribute themselves across space and time, interact with one another and perceive, respond to, and in turn, modify their environment. Our groups research is therefore increasingly working across scales, combining experiments, field work and computational modelling to understand how ecological communities assemble and disassemble, moving from global environmental gradients, down to the behaviour, physiology and life history of individual organisms, and back again to predict large-scale patterns of biodiversity across space and time.
Our research is motivated by addressing fundamental questions but we are also committed to producing actionable science to protect and enhance biodiversity. In fact, many of the basic insights we are now developing have come from asking applied questions.
To address this, our research takes a macroscopic perspective, analysing the distribution and dynamics of biodiversity across large spatial, taxonomic and/or temporal scales. There has never been a better or more exciting time to address these questions. Centuries of collection efforts by naturalists, advances in genetic sequencing and remote sensing, and global citizen science initiatives, are now enabling scientists to map and characterise biodiversity at unprecedented scales and resolutions, providing detailed information on where each species lives on the planet, its ecological niche and its phylogenetic relationships. Through developing and applying computational models to large empirical datasets our research has revealed how many aspects of the dynamics of biodiversity, from bursts of speciation during adaptive radiations to the collapse of ecological communities, arise from constraints imposed by the physical environment that organisms occupy. While Hutchinson's evolutionary play is held in an ecological theatre, it is performed on a geographical stage.
These macroscopic patterns and processes ultimately arise from the behaviour and dynamics of individual organisms, how they distribute themselves across space and time, interact with one another and perceive, respond to, and in turn, modify their environment. Our groups research is therefore increasingly working across scales, combining experiments, field work and computational modelling to understand how ecological communities assemble and disassemble, moving from global environmental gradients, down to the behaviour, physiology and life history of individual organisms, and back again to predict large-scale patterns of biodiversity across space and time.
Our research is motivated by addressing fundamental questions but we are also committed to producing actionable science to protect and enhance biodiversity. In fact, many of the basic insights we are now developing have come from asking applied questions.
