Research

Main interests

I am broadly interested in understanding how biodiversity is distributed on Earth. My overarching mission is to study the processes governing community structure and species distributions that can contribute to delineate general principles in community ecology and biogeography. I like to separate my work in two different but convergent lines of research.

Movement and dispersal ecology

Movement is a key process to understand how individuals, populations and species are distributed across spatial scales. It links local populations and communities at regional scales, maintaining metapopulations and metacommunities, and contributes to define species distribution ranges, ultimately influencing biogeography. Much of my work has been focused on estimating long distance dispersal (LDD), namely propagule dispersal dispersed by birds, and understanding how it affects biodiversity distribution at different spatial scales.

Community ecology and biogeography

Biodiversity distribution is determined by movement (including dispersal) and other ecological processes, namely niche selection and ecological drift. I have been studying how these different ecological processes contribute to generate observed species distributions and diversity patterns in space and time, at different spatial scales, under ongoing global change.