Diversity is found among all kinds of organisms, from single cell microbes to viruses, plants and animals. In my past research I focused on different angiosperm lineages. Angiosperms are the most diverse plant group with several key innovations, such as flower and fruit. Those structures attract other organisms mostly by providing food, as such they form one of the most important components of living biodiversity. 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. As a postdoctoral scholar 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.

Broadly, I am interested in how the evolutionary history and ecology of species influence species composition at large scales. We first have to understand what influences biodiversity before we can understand the impact of changing climates and destroyed habitats on biodiversity. Thus, we need to know how species adapt to new conditions, what allows them to diversify and how species are assembled. Abiotic and biotic factors influence lineage diversification and determine which species are able to occur in which regions. Besides those close-relatedness and trait similarity can affect diversification patterns of species in regions. Insights into these aspects are important if we want to understand broad-scale patterns of diversity and how they change over time.

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..

Linking diverse databases (e.g. iDigBio, GBIF) with methods used in phylogenetics and ecology (automated reconstruction of phylogenies, character reconstruction methods) by using informatics, large-scale analyses involving a wider range of data have become feasible. This opens up amazing opportunities to study the evolution and biogeographic history of species and areas. Combining the questions and data from different fields (systematics, phylogenetics, macroevolution, ecology and earth sciences) will provide insights into lineage diversification and floristic composition in time and space.