Environmental variability has been a key driver of biodiversity throughout Earth’s history. This variability encompasses long-term climate trends, cyclical glacial-interglacial patterns, and short-term extreme events that unfold over hours to days. Each of these types of variability can shape the evolution and distribution of biodiversity, but how significant are these drivers across different spatial and temporal scales? And are there other crucial factors at play?
My research aims to address these questions by employing simulation-based experiments to investigate how environmental variability, along with other potential drivers, affects biodiversity across both space and time. To achieve this, my work integrates agent-based simulations and experiments that incorporate global climate models of Earth's past and future, remote sensing and reanalysis data, empirical biodiversity datasets, and mathematical modelling tools to identify causal mechanisms that structure biodiversity.
The questions that guide my work include:
What eco-evolutionary feedbacks help stabilize ecological communities?
How does temporal autocorrelation influence biodiversity?
How will present and future land-use change alter the spatial and temporal distribution of environmental variability — and what are the implications for ecosystems?
