Ecological and evolutionary processes
What are the abiotic and biotic processes that underlie biodiversity patterns? What did the past, does the present, and will the future look like? We work at the interfaces of evolutionary ecology, experimental ecology, macroecology, and palaeoecology to better understand the fundamental processes that underpin biodiversity.
Main content
Current research includes:
Hosts and parasites under global change (ongoing since 2020). This project addresses human effects on the ecology and evolution of parasites, and how this impacts their hosts. This involves two main activities. First, we monitor forest birds and their parasites, locally and within international networks, and focus on the strong links we find between spring temperature and parasitism. Second, in ParAnthropE (NFR fripro, 2020-2027) we test central predictions on how parasitism evolves in crowded and connected - as opposed to reduced and fragmented - populations. Rapid changes in population densities are a key aspect of global change: we seek to understand how this affects infectious organisms. Our approach is from terrestrial ecology and the principles apply to all ecosystems, but for reasons of tractability we test them in a marine parasite easily maintained in the lab.
Next generation biomarkers in palynology and palaeoecology. This project aims to develop novel methods to reconstruct past ecological and climatic variables based on chemical biomarkers observed in pollen grains. So far work has shown differences in chemistry between sub-genera in certain pollen types, improving taxonomic precision and the ecological information obtainable in fossil sediment sequences. This project also involves using field and greenhouse experiments to develop the first quantitative reconstruction method of UV-B radiation based on pollen biomarkers