Current research projects
Spider community assembly in the Eatern Arc Mountains, Tanzania
What drives community assembly? This is obviously no trivial question. Through our project we aim to advance in the understanding of how communities are put together. Our model system is the Udzungwa Mountains, in the Eastern Arc Mountains, Tanzania, where we are using a novel framework to investigate community assembly using spider communities as a model. By combining habitat-related physical and (functional and phylogenetic) community structure data we are looking into the way climate and geography, habitat use and dispersal all interact to determine how species are filtered into communities. From evolutionary and conservation points of view, these mountains are also particularly exciting as they form an inland archipelago with a history at least as fascinating as that of the Galápagos Islands, and they contain some of the oldest and most stable forests of Africa and some of the most endemism-rich forests in the world.
Nikolaj Scharff (CMEC, Natural History Museum of Denmark), Pedro Cardoso (Finnish Museum of Natural History), Luis Crespo (Univ. of Barcelona, Spain), among others
Expanding COBRAs (optimised and standardised sampling protocols)
When you are collecting data or samples in the field you do not want to waste your time and resources. You want to be make the most of your effort (conduct an optimal sampling). But you might also want to generate comparable data (follow standardised sampling). The COBRA sampling protocols can precisely help us achive that because they are optimised (they provide the maximum number of species) and standardised (they are applicable to other sites with the same ecosystem). We are expanding our COBRA plots around the world while designing protocols for new habitats.
Pedro Cardoso, Rosemary Gillespie (Univ. of California, Berkeley, USA), Brent Emerson (CSIC, Spain), Miquel Arnedo (Univ. of Barcelona, Spain), Paulo A.V. Borges (IBBC, Univ. of Azores), Nikolaj Scharff, among others
MACDIV - Macaronesian Islands as a testing ground to assess biodiversity drivers at multiple scales
What are the factors behind the generation and maintainance of spatial heterogeneity in biodiversity? That is no trivial question. The MACDIV project has been concieved to advance our understanding of those factors. Our model system is the Macaronesian islands and our model organisms spiders. Beyond the scientific outcome of this project, the results will have a practical use: they will contribute to the EU BEST Indicator Essential Biodiversity Variables for Islands and for the new IPBE platform, and to Strategic Goal C of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2020 as defined in the CBD 2011-2020 Strategic Plan.
Paulo A. V. Borges, Pedro Cardoso, Brent Emerson, Miquel Arnedo, Luis Crespo and many others
SPIDER: SPecies IDentification and Evolution in R
This is an ongoing project for the development of the R package SPIDER. It is designed for the analyses of DNA sequence data, particularly for research related to DNA barcoding and species delimitation. It includes functions for testing divergence threshold limits, analysing specimen identification efficacy, and assessing diagnostic nucleotides and probability of reciprocal monophyly. We have also developed a haplotype accumulation function for sample size estimations and a sliding window function for analysing different regions across a gene and designing markers in studies working with degraded DNA.
Sam Brown, Rupert Collins, Stephane Boyer, Marie-Caroline Lefort, Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte, Cor Vink, Robert Cruickshank
The roles of climate change and
habitat specificity on speciation
Environmental changes and the subsequent ecosystem shifts in space can confine populations in reduced areas and lead to speciation. We are conducting a phylogeographic study of the Ischyropsalis (Opiliones: Ischyropsalididae) species in northern Iberian Peninsula to understand how the latest climatic and geological changes may have affected the current distribution of the species, and what ecological and evolutionary processes took part in the process.
J. Malumbres-Olarte, Carlos Prieto, Benjamín Gómez, María José Madeira
Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte, Ph.D.