- How do environmental changes condition the genetic constitution of species and communities?
Addressing the impact of ongoing environmental changes on species and communities is crucial for uncovering historical drivers of species and genetic diversity and ultimately improving our ability to forecast biodiversity’s fate under environmental change—a critical requirement for effective conservation. We investigate these historical drivers and how they shape current species through the use of spatio-temporal explicit simulations that account for real world complexity and species individual characteristics while focusing on how cohesively have communities responded to past environmental changes and how are they likely to respond in the future.
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- How do prevailing landscapes affect the interaction between gene flow and selection, and hence the opportunities for population divergence vs. the risk of extinction?
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Landscape features can impact levels of gene flow between populations by: i) determining dispersal rates and routes, ii) influencing the likelihood of successful establishment of immigrants, and iii) indirectly conditioning the effect of gene flow through its effect on selective pressures and local effective population sizes. Using a combination of population genetics analyses and demographic modeling, we explore the effects of natural and human-induced landscapes in structuring non-adaptive and adaptive genotypic and phenotypic variation via these three mechanisms.
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- What can genomic analyses tell us about the future of species and populations and how can we use this information for designing effective conservation strategies?
Global climate change is causing major shifts in the geographical distribution and abundance of populations. These changes are predicted to lead to novel biotic and abiotic selective environments and the spatial reshuffling of genetic diversity—including adaptive alleles. Utilizing novel genomic and bioinformatic tools, we are simultaneously assessing the current conservation status of populations and the risk of future potential genomic mal-adaptation with the ultimate goal of forecasting the future of biodiversity and improve our understanding of the underlying evolutionary dynamics.
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- Which historical processes do account for the hyper-diverse small terrestrial mammal fauna of the northern Andes?
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The high biological diversity associated with environmentally heterogeneous regions reflects the complex interactions between multiple evolutionary and ecological processes. Disentangling this interaction is crucial for understanding a wide variety of fundamental biological questions including the differential accumulation of species across the globe. By integrating theoretical expectations with comprehensive analyses of species, genetic, and phenotypic variation in small terrestrial mammals across the hyper-diverse tropical Andes, I am working on elucidating the role that environmental heterogeneity plays in the generation and maintenance of diversity.
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- What are the main mechanistic processes underlying diversification on mountain tropical systems?
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Answering how diverse communities are established and maintained, and why some regions are more diverse than others, have been among the major biological inquiries. Of particular interest have been environmental gradients given their pervasive effect on diversity patterns. Taking advantage of the exponential increase of genomic resources for non-model organisms and the increased cost-effectiveness of NGS approaches, we investigate how the topographic and climatic complexity of montane region may facilitate population differentiation by uncovering the phylogeographic structure and biogeographic history of species with contrasting altitudinal and environmental distributions.
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- How can we improve population genetic inference by incorporating spatially explicit analyses?
Traditional population genetic analyses overlook the spatial component of genetic variation that is innate in natural systems and can be informative about historical spatio-demographic processes. With the aim of improving demographic inference, I develop novel analytical tools that combine statistically rigorous spatial analyses and robust population genetics models. These tools bridge phylogeography and landscape genetics by paving the way for phylogeographers wanting to incorporate spatial models and data as well as landscape geneticists wanting to incorporate history.
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