Third party funded individual grant
Start date : 01.08.2018
End date : 31.07.2019
Outlining and understanding the geographic structuring of biodiversity is a major challenge both for modern and past ecosystems. Different approaches to delineate biogeographic units are currently applied, which result in vastly different patterns. In order to objectively define biogeographic provinces, I propose a two-year research project to develop quantitative methods that outline biogeographical units based on marine organismic occurrence data. The so-defined units will allow the assessment of between-unit, beta-level diversity patterns over the Phanerozoic as well. This will enable the scrutinization of hypotheses such as that continent configuration drives global marine beta diversity patterns, and that beta diversity drops in post-extinction recovery ecosystems. The project will constitute method development and testing on simulated data to rigorously assess their capacity and increase their accuracy as well. The proposed project is divided into four discreet phases, each built on the results of the previous one. Research will start with the analysis of biogeographic patterns in modern oceans, which will be followed by the analyses of the fossil record in individual time slices. The project will be concluded with the outlining of quantitatively defined, traceable biogeographic units over the Phanerozoic. Success in the development of the proposed methodology will allow the analysis of the biogeographic structure in marine settings based on a reproducible partitioning scheme.