Changes in climate during the Late Quaternary have played a relevant role in shaping today's biodiversity. Using vertebrates as study organisms, my research aims to understand the evolutionary consequences of these past changes, particularly in contexts such as heterogeneous environments and islands. In my current postdoctoral project, I focus on land-bridge islands, which have been repeatedly connected to the mainland as a result of sea-level fluctuations and therefore exhibit a particularly dynamic history. By integrating morphological and genomic data, I explore how biodiversity patterns have been shaped both above and below the species level, and how they compare to the mainland and to more isolated systems, such as oceanic islands.
Keywords
Evolution, island biology, tropics, birds, museomics, phylogenetics,
phylogeography, population genetics, morphology