Unveiling the distribution of life on earth

A long standing question in Ecology is whether most species are rare. Understanding this question is key for a range of questions from the dominant speciation mode to the question about how many species are on planet Earth. Here we tackle this question using data from GBIF to build species abundance distributions for different taxonomic groups, and comparing them with log-series, negative binomial and log-normal distributions.

 

Henrique Pereira is an expert on global biodiversity change. He has worked both as a researcher and as a practitioner, having served as the Director of Peneda-Gerês National Park and as the coordinator of the Portugal Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Since 2013, he is the Professor of Biodiversity Conservation at iDiv - German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and Invited Professor at InBio, Universidade do Porto (Portugal). He was the co-Chair of the Biodiversity Observation Network of the Group on Earth Observations and of the Expert Group on Scenarios and Models from the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. He currently leads EuropaBON, a project designing a biodiversity monitoring network for Europe. He has published over one hundred scientific papers and reports on biodiversity issues.  

[Host: Luís Borda de Água, Theoretical Ecology and Biodiversity Modelling - THEOECO]