EQUILIBRIUM DIVERSITY DYNAMICS ON ISLANDS: INSIGHTS FROM BIRDS AND BATS

Islands are natural laboratories for studying biodiversity: they are isolated, have discrete boundaries and harbour many unique species. Do islands tend towards an equilibrium number of species over evolutionary time scales? How do anthropogenic extinctions affect long-term evolutionary dynamics on islands? Answering these outstanding questions requires reconstructing processes and events that took place in the distant past. I will address these topics using a combination of molecular phylogenies, dynamic stochastic modelling and paleontological data. As case studies, I will focus on terrestrial birds and bats of several islands worldwide (Macaronesia, Galápagos, West Indies).

Luís Valente is a research associate at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. He was previously a Marie-Curie Fellow at Imperial College London and a Humboldt Fellow at University of Potsdam. His main research focus is the evolution of biodiversity on islands. He is currently using mechanistic models to reconstruct the pattern of species accumulation on islands over evolutionary time scales, using a new global phylogenetic dataset of islands birds.

[Host: Martim Melo, Tropical Biology]

Image credits: Brock Fenton & Olivier Hébert