Research

The question of why species occur in some places and not in others has intrigued scientists for centuries. Ecological requirements, biotic interactions, and evolutionary histories determine the distribution of species, and multidisciplinary approaches are needed to study them. Throughout my scientific career, I have addressed Biogeography from different perspectives, from local intraspecific studies to global macroevolutionary approaches, always working in a Botanical framework because of the interesting patterns in plant evolution.

Island Biogeography

Oceanic islands are among the most interesting places for evolutionary study because they emerge from the sea floor. Then, the occurrence of terrestrial organisms in these places can only be explained by long-distance dispersal events from other land masses. Still, the observation of these dispersal events is virtually impossible. Because of that, I have been applying phylogenetic approaches and I developed new analytical methods to estimate the number of colonization events and compare the colonization success of different species. I was focused on this approach during my Ph. D. dissertation, including several field trips to the Canarian archipelago to collect specimens for my analyses.

Estimation of colonization events as a function of sampling effort (Coello et al., 2022)

Spatial phylogenetics

The study of biodiversity patterns is important to understand species ranges and biogeographic regionalizations. Traditionally, biodiversity patterns have been associated with a taxonomic bias, because they are usually studied at some level (e.g., species level). During the last few years, the field of spatial phylogenetics has been increasing in popularity because it studies biodiversity patterns in a phylogenetic framework. In my career, I had the opportunity to explore this approach working in the study of spatial phylogenetic patterns of the angiosperm flora in the Iberian Peninsula.

Relative phylogenetic diversity significance of the angiosperm flora in the Iberian Peninsula (Coello et al., in prep.)

Pantropical disjunctions

One of the greatest questions in Biogeography is why unrelated lineages of organisms display similar distribution patterns, occurring in very distant parts of the world. Pantropical disjunction is a common biogeographic pattern in which organisms are distributed across continents in the Southern Hemisphere. It is frequent to observe this pattern in lineages as a result of the breakup of Gondwana. However, some other groups have this pattern because of other reasons. In my postdoc at the National Museum of Natural History, I am studying the Pantropical disjunction of Cissus, the largest genus of the grape family (Vitaceae), which displays this disjunction by other causes than vicariance.

Pantropical disjunction in Cissus after the breakup of Gondwana (Coello et al., in prep.)

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