Tag Archives: Biogeography

Island Biogeography Revisited: an online experiment on book reading club

GrrlScientist (of the Guardian, among other things) and BiK-F / Senckenberg are doing an interesting reading experiment:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2015/apr/09/island-biogeography-revisited-an-online-experiment

Discussion of the first chapter online:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2015/apr/15/island-biogeography-revisited-online-book-club-chapter-one?CMP=share_btn_tw

Department seminar Friday 16.1. / Dr Nick Matzke

Dear all,

This Friday (16.1.) the departmental seminar is given by Dr Nick Matzke from NIMBioS (http://www.nimbios.org/personnel/pd_Matzke).

Friday, 16.1.2015

Time: 14.15

Location: D112 Physicum, Kumpula Campus (NB: new lecture hall)

Title: MODEL SELECTION IN HISTORICAL BIOGEOGRAPHY: WHEN IS FOUNDER-EVENT SPECIATION IMPORTANT?

SUMMARY:

New Biogeography Model: Founder-event speciation, where a rare jump dispersal event founds a new genetically isolated lineage, has long been considered crucial by many historical biogeographers, but its importance is disputed within the vicariance school. Probabilistic modeling of geographic range evolution creates the potential to test different biogeographical models against data using standard statistical model choice procedures, as long as multiple models are available. I re-implement the Dispersal-Extinction-Cladogenesis (DEC) model of LAGRANGE in the R package BioGeoBEARS, and modify it to create a new model, DEC+J, which adds founder-event speciation, the importance of which is governed by a new free parameter, j. Both models are shown to be special cases of the “claSSE” model.

Further applications: Probabilistic modeling in biogeography opens up many possible research applications, including biogeographical stochastic mapping, biogeographical dating, and inclusion of phylogenetic information in species distribution modeling (SDM).

All are welcome

Anu