
Congratulations to Søren Faurby who just started a post doc at Miguel Araújo lab funded by the Danish research council.
Søren is trained as an evolutionary biologist but much of his research has been on the interface between ecology and evolutionary biology. Søren received his PhD in 2009 from Aarhus University (Denmark) and has since then worked as a post doc at UCLA (California) and at Aarhus University. One main project in Sørens last post doc focused on the magnitude and cause of the late Pleistocene/ Early Holocene mammalian megafauna extinction.
Sørens post doc project is entitled “Shifting baselines in macro-ecology and macro-evolution” and can be seen as an extension of this work on the megafauna .extinction In his post doc at Miguel Araújos lab, Søren’s work will focus on the consequences of the Pleistocene/ Early Holocene mammalian megafauna extinctions as well as the recent extinctions and range contractions. Many large scale studies analyze current distributional patterns or perhaps distributional patterns as they were a generation or two ago, with the explicit or implicit assumption that these represent natural patterns. Sørens work will analyze the effects of this assumption by analyzing how different ecological or evolutionary conclusions are when estimated natural distributions as opposed to current distributions are used in the analyses.