Summary

1 minute explanation in Spanish

Over the past 100 years, Earth’s climate has become warmer and precipitation regimes have changed. Can we predict the effects of these changes on biodiversity? Research in the lab seeks improving understanding of the key mechanisms governing the distribution of life on Earth, with strong focus on species distributions. Basic research in the lab tends to feed into the development of models to forecast species distributional dynamics under climate- and land-use change scenarios. To address these questions, we integrate large climate and species distributions databases with descriptions of behavioural and physiological traits of species, molecular phylogenies, and the fossil record. Most research in the lab involves statistical analyses of ecological data, including data mining, bioclimatic modeling, and mathematical simulations, but large-scale experiments, including microcosm and mesocosm experiments, are now being devised for testing models and theory on species distributions and species coexistence.