Diversity is found among all kinds of organisms, from single cell microbes to viruses, plants and animals. In my research I focus on different angiosperm lineages, but especially from the Asteraceae family. Plants colonize the world usually through passive dispersal and they have to cope with the environmental conditions they find in the new areas. They have evolved amazing strategies to be able to produce offsprings, e.g. selfing and hybridization, and can occur in extremly harsh habitats. I focus on the evolution of traits and biographical history of plant species to understand why certain lineages diversify in particular regions and others do not. I am developing a tool to easily and accurately update phylogenies and to combine occurrence data with species and trait data on a large scale.

A major focus of my research is the tropical alpine ecosystem, a system I use to ask these questions in a comparative setting. Tropical alpine habitats are scattered across high mountains in the tropics, so lineages that live there give a natural replicate experiment for studying colonization, in situ speciation, and diversification under similar climatic conditions but in different geographic settings. I have worked on this comparatively in the Afroalpine of the East African mountains and in the Páramo of the South American Andes. This work spans reconstructing the age and colonization history of the Afroalpine flora, developing a climate-based delimitation of the tropical alpine ecosystem to compare habitat stability through time, and testing why the Páramo is so much more species-rich than the Afroalpine despite similar climates, tracing this difference back to how species partition ecological niches and geographic range. I have also worked on the methodological side of this question, developing approaches to disentangle incomplete lineage sorting and hybridization as sources of phylogenetic discordance in these young, rapidly radiating groups, easily building large phylogenies and keeping them uptodate.

My long term research interest is to combine phylogenetic and ecological research questions. I believe, that if we want to understand what influences biodiversity we have to integrate different fields. Looking into the past, might open a window to the future. By combining the the evolutionary history of species with the ecology and its today’s distribution, we can get insights into factors contributing to speciation and adaptation. Important questions to ask are: What enables one lineage to diversify in a certain ecological setting, while others could not? Do we see differences between lineages in the same habitat because of different habitat conditions, pre-adaptations or competition? But also, why are those species absent from one region, while they occur in other similar environments? Can the composition of species be related to past processes that shaped the species assembly? These questions are important to answer and will help us to understand broad-scale patterns of how are communities or even ecosystems composed, how is diversity maintained and what influences the composition today, in the past and will influence in the future..