Research Interest
Why do plant species grow where they grow? And don't grow where they don't? Knowing how preferences or tolerances to abiotic environmental gradients evolved will help us answering this question. That's why I am interested in the evolution of ecological characteristics of plants. How comes species evolved differences in ecological requirements? What kinds of evolutionary models are best able to describe the observed diversity in plant's ecological preferences? Is ecological diversification simply a result of speciation or is ecological diversification of populations actually a driver of speciation processes? Finding out more about these questions will also help us to predict how global change is going to affect biodiversity on earth in the near future.
Analyzing abiotic environmental factors won't be sufficient when assessing global change impact. Biotic interactions are as important in determining species' range limits and need to be studied carefully, too. Studying the assembly of local communities and assemblages using the framework of niche ecology integrates both abiotic and biotic components.
Finally, I am very much interested in bridging gaps between research disciplines. Ecologists on their own won't be able to explain the above questions, neither will be evolutionary biologists. I am very happy to work in projects that try to combine the best of each of the involved disciplines to better understand the fascinating diversity of life on earth!
Projects
Ongoing
DivScaling: the scaling of diversity in Swiss forests
2019-2023
Funding: National Forest Inventory; granted to Brigitte Rohner and Rafael Wüest (PIs)
The main objective of this project is to elaborate how different diversity components in Swiss forests change with increasing area and how they depend on changing heterogeneity.
For more details, see: https://www.wsl.ch/en/projects/divscaling.html
EPHI: developing the predictive ecology of plant-animal interactions across space and time
2018-2023
Funding: European Research Comission; granted to Catherine Graham
In the face of the alarming pace of recent environmental change on Earth we lack the tools to accurately predict how biodiversity and ecosystem services will respond. One key gap in knowledge that limits our predictive ability is uncertainty concerning how the biotic interactions that are essential for species persistence and ecosystem services (i.e., pollination) will change. Developing a predictive science of species interactions requires integrating evolutionary, biogeographic and ecological mechanisms acting at different spatial and temporal scales. We will use a hierarchical cross-scale approach, combining phylogeography, network ecology, statistical modelling and experiments, to disentangle the mechanisms governing species richness and mutualistic interactions in tropical hummingbirds and their food plants.
MoGLI: Modeling the potential distribution of woody species in Switzerland
2017-2019
Funding: National Forest Inventory; granted to Andri Baltensweiler and Kurt Bollmann
The applied goal of the project is to model the potential distribution of the most common Swiss woody species at very high resoltion for use in forest management. Models are based on distribution data from the Swiss National Forest Inventory using high resolution climate and soil data, as well as terrain atributes based on high precision elevation model (swissALTI3D) and forest structure data using LiDAR. Scientific challanges lie in the development of soil, terrain, and structural variables or indices that best approximate the relevant ecological conditions or underlying processes.
The use of joint models in biodiversity modeling
2018-ongoing
No explicit funding
The appearance of joint species distribution models (JSDMs) in ecological research and applications is promising - JSDMs let us model potential habitat suitability of species not in isolation but including inter-specific associations. This project aims to evaluate the advantages and to identify potential pitfalls of using JSDMs in biodiversity research and applications.
Some more information here.
ClimSens - Climate Sensitivity of plants and animals in Switzerland
2016-ongoing
Funding: Canton of Aargau, Canton of Bern, Canton of Zurich
This project assesses for several cantons the sensitivity of (mostly) plants and animals to expected climatic changes. The assessments rely on the current distribution of the species and their so called indicator-values that are assessed at the community-level. Results indicates whether climatic changes are rather threatening, may act neutrally, or may even favor a certain species.
Some more information here.
STACCATO: AgriCultural ChAnge Through ecological engineering and Optimal use of natural resources
2015-2017
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (grant 158395) granted to Niklaus Zimmermann
Agricultural landscapes are often subjected to intensive use. This can reduce biodiversity and - in consequence - ecosystem services like pollination, biological pest control, or recreational use. STACCATO is a BiodivERsA project carried out in collaboration with 10 European Institutions. Our project part focuses on biodiversity and aims to investigate direct effects of climate and land-use change on biodiversity, as well as indirect effects on ecosystem services.
Please visit the STACCATO project website for more information.
Completed
Distribution of Functional Traits in French Alpine Plant Communities
2014-2015
Funding: ERC - TEEMBIO (European Research Council - Starting Grant project 2012-2016) granted to Wilfried Thuiller
Knowing how functional characteristics of communities change along environmental gradients allows to project changes in functional traits across space and time in times of global change. The project aims at generating models to simultaneously project multiple functional traits along environmental gradients. We know that functional traits are correlated within species, and the projects seeks to establish whether the species-level correlations scale up to the community level. Such correlations, if existent, need to be taken into account when modeling community-level functional traits along environmental gradients.
Coexistence and the Evolution of Climate Niches and Functional Traits
2013-2014
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (fellowship for prospective researchers; grant 147226) granted to Rafael Wüest
The assembly of communities and the evolution of relevant traits have intrigued biologists for decades. Community ecologists have investigated the rules according to which species from a regional species pool get assembled into communities. Evolutionary biologists have investigated the evolution of regional species pools and traits associated with assembly rules. The merging of these two research fields has recently started but is still in its infancy. It is the primary goal of the project, financed by a SNF mobility fellowship, to fill the gap between the two disciplines and advance our understanding of how evolutionary processes and the assembly of communities have interacted to create today’s biodiversity patterns.
SPEED: SPatially Explicit Evolution of Diversity
2009-2013
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation (Sinergia) granted to Peter B. Pearman, Niklaus E. Zimmermann, Nicolas Salamin, Christian Lexer
This interdisciplenary project, financed by the SNF Sinergia program, investigates niche evolution. We seek to understand how the species niche has evolved and how the capacity for niche change might impact future patterns of species diversity in the face of ongoing climate change. Gaining an understanding of these niche dynamics entails understanding how species niches differ currently and how these differences evolved. We need to understand how rates of evolution in groups of related species change in time. To understand how changes in the composition of regional species pools translates into changes in biodiversity, we need to understand how ecological similarities among species, represented by species evolutionary relationships, influence the composition of ecological communities.