Where does our current biodiversity come from? And how have the complex interactions between organisms shaped the world to the one we see today? These questions fascinate me endlessly. From the highly specialized frugivores to the immense diversity of plants in hostile environments, our natural world never fails to amaze. My interests lie in evolution and ecology. As a result, I’m working on projects on how tropical seed-dispersing birds and monkeys are affected by human presence, and on how abiotic conditions impact plant evolution.
As a guest researcher at the Biodiversity Hotspots group, I compare the Buckthorn-family (Rhamnaceae) in two systems, the South-African Cape Floristic Region, and the South-West Australian Floristic Region. In these systems, an immense diversity of flowering plants is found, of which many are endemic (‘exclusive’) to that region. How or why this is the case is hard to understand, but I hypothesize that the small-scale spatial variation in extremely tough environmental conditions make each plant species a specialist in their abiotic niche. I hope to link this to their phylogeny, and see how they evolved to thrive in their specific environments. In my eyes it is essential to look at biodiversity through an evolutionary perspective; to see what conditions species have adapted to, and to understand what threatens them.
Keywords
Evolution, macro-ecology, phylogenetic diversity, spatial phylogenetics, Rhamnaceae, seed dispersal