Posts

Although global warming is currently threatening biodiversity, we know from past records that cooling periods can also be disastrous in terms of extinction rates. During the Eocene, about 50 million years ago, the Earth was so warm that there were no permanent ice caps in the poles, and warm-loving subtropical species thrived at quite high latitudes.

Next week I am teaching a course on statistical data analysis using R, here in the Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge. It is aimed at advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and other researchers with no or little experience in statistical analysis and/or R.

My colleague Neftalí Sillero and Pedro Tarroso have published recently a nice comparative review of different free and open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) which can be useful to ecologists and evolutionary biologists willing to start using these tools or trying alternatives to proprietary software (mostly ArcGIS).

Stepping into the next stage in your academic career after the PhD can be difficult. Many new doctors just don’t know what to do or where to look for. As I recently passed through it, and before I forget all this, I will post here some guidance notes from my own experience, hoping they may be useful to anyone in the future.

Many of us often need to gather species lists, either from our own field surveys or from bibliographical sources and databases. Many problems may arise during this process. For instance, a species may have been given different names by different authors, and we don’t know which one is currently accepted.

The Mediterranean region is a renowned hotspot of plant biodiversity. It hosts some 25000 plant species, about half of them being endemics. Some species have been present for many million years, or even originated here, whilst others arrived much more ‘recently’.

Since October 2010 I have been in Cambridge (UK) as a postdoctoral research associate in the Forest Ecology Group led by Dr David Coomes, thanks to a fellowship from the Fundación Ramón Areces.