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35
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Introduction
I am a computational palaeobiologist investigating the drivers of biodiversity patterns across a range of temporal and spatial scales. My research primarily focuses on the co-evolution of life and the environment, and evaluating the influence of data incompleteness on our perceptions of the geological past. To do so, I integrate a range of interdisciplinary tools and sources of information, such as ecological modelling, Earth system modelling and fossil occurrence data.
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Position
- PhD Student
Education
September 2011 - July 2015
Publications
Publications (35)
Paleotemperature proxy records are widely used to reconstruct the global climate throughout the Phanerozoic and to test macroevolutionary hypotheses. However, the spatial distribution of these records varies through time. This is problematic because heat is unevenly distributed across Earth’s surface. Consequently, heterogeneous spatial sampling of...
Today, warm-water coral reefs are limited to tropical-to-subtropical latitudes. These diverse ecosystems extended further poleward in the geological past, but the mechanisms driving these past distributions remain uncertain. Here, we test the role of climate and palaeogeo- graphy in shaping the distribution of coral reefs over geological timescales...
1. The open-source programming language ‘R' has become a standard tool in the palaeobiologist's toolkit. Its popularity within the palaeobiological community continues to grow, with published articles increasingly citing the usage of R and R packages. However, there are currently a lack of agreed standards for data preparation and available framewo...
Effective data visualisation is vital for data exploration, analysis and communication in research. In ecology and evolutionary biology, data are often associated with various taxonomic entities. Graphics of organisms associated with these taxa are valuable for framing results within a broader biological context. However, acquiring and using such r...
Global plate models (GPMs) aim to reconstruct the tectonic evolution of the Earth by modelling the motion of the plates and continents through time. These models enable palaeobiologists to study the past distribution of extinct organisms. However, different GPMs exist that vary in their partitioning of the Earth's surface and the modelling of conti...
Whether non-avian dinosaurs were in decline prior to their extinction 66 million years ago remains a contentious topic. This uncertainty arises from spatiotemporal sampling inconsistency and data absence, which cause challenges in distinguishing between genuine biological trends and sampling artifacts. Consequently, there is an inherent interest in...
Large datasets of fossil occurrences, often downloaded from online community-maintained databases, are a vital resource for understanding broad-scale evolutionary patterns, such as how biodiversity has changed through time and space. Such datasets, however, are not infallible and must be 'cleaned' of inaccurate, incomplete, or duplicate data prior...
Background
Coral reefs provide habitat for approximately 25% of all extant marine species, including 845 species of scleractinian corals. These rich ecosystems are becoming increasingly degraded in many regions by a range of anthropogenic factors, including recurrent bleaching episodes associated with rising sea surface temperatures. Within the nor...
The latitudinal gradient of declining species richness from the Equator towards the poles is one of the most pervasive macroecological patterns on Earth today. However, the ubiquity of this trend over geological timescales remains unclear. One reason for this uncertainty is that palaeobiologists need Global Plate Models (GPMs) to estimate the latit...
The geological record is a vast archive of information that provides the only empirical data about the evolution of the Earth. In recent years, concentrated efforts have been made to compile macrostratigraphic data into the online centralized database Macrostrat. Macrostrat is a global stratigraphic database containing information regarding surface...
The geological record is a vast archive of information that provides the only empirical data about the evolution of the Earth. In recent years, concentrated efforts have been made to compile macrostratigraphic data into the online centralized database Macrostrat (https://macrostrat.org). Macrostrat is a global stratigraphic database containing info...
Global Plate Models are widely used in the Earth Sciences to reconstruct the past geographic position of geological and palaeontological samples. However, the application of Global Plate Models to retrieve ‘palaeocoordinates’ is not trivial. Different Global Plate Models exist which vary in their complexity, spatiotemporal coverage, reference frame...
A fundamental question in dinosaur evolution is how they adapted to long-term climatic shifts during the Mesozoic and when they developed environmentally independent, avian-style acclimatization, becoming endothermic. The ability of warm-blooded dinosaurs to flourish in harsher environments, including cold, high-latitude regions, raises intriguing...
Accurately reconstructing large-scale palaeoclimatic patterns from sparse local records is critical for understanding the evolution of Earth's climate. Particular challenges arise from the patchiness, uneven spatial distribution, and disparate nature of palaeoclimatic proxy records. Geochemical data typically provide temperature estimates via trans...
A fundamental question in dinosaur evolution is how they adapted to substantial long-term shifts in Earth System during the Mesozoic and when they developed environmentally independent, avian-style acclimatization due to the evolution of an endothermic physiology. Combining fossil occurrences with macroevolutionary and paleoclimatic models, we unve...
Data visualisation is vital for data exploration, analysis, and communication in research. Moreover, it can bridge gaps between researchers and the general public by making research findings more accessible and engaging. Today, researchers increasingly conduct their data analyses in programming languages such as R and Python. The availability of da...
1. Global Plate Models (GPMs) aim to reconstruct the tectonic evolution of the Earth by modelling the motion of the plates and continents through time. These models enable palaeobiologists to study the past distribution of extinct organisms. However, different GPMs exist that vary in their partitioning of the Earth’s surface and the modelling of co...
Accurately reconstructing large-scale palaeoclimate patterns from sparse local records is critical for understanding the evolution of Earth’s climate. Particular challenges arise from the patchiness, uneven spatial distribution, and disparate nature of palaeoclimatic proxy records. Geochemical data typically provide temperature estimates via transf...
Il clade Dinosauria è un ottimo candidato per lo studio degli effetti del clima sulla macroevoluzione dei vertebrati, avendo attraversato numerosi cambiamenti climatici e paleogeografici sin dalla sua origine, ~235 milioni di anni fa (ma). Per questo studio è stato generato un registro basato su esemplari di tutti i taxa di dinosauri fossili ad ogg...
1. The open-source programming language ‘R’ has become a standard tool in the palaeobiologist’s toolkit. Its popularity within the palaeobiology community continues to grow, with published articles increasingly citing the usage of R and R packages. However, there are currently a lack of agreed standards for data preparation and available frameworks...
Ecological Niche Models (ENM), the set of different algorithms and workflows designed to obtain hypothetical maps of species, have been broadly used in studies on current biogeography, macroecology and conservation biology. The field experienced hot methodological debates around 10 years ago, when researchers tested the accuracy of the different al...
This poster summarises our ongoing research on the impact of using different Plate Rotation Models (PRMs, also know as "Global Plate Models" or "Palaeorotation models") in a palaeobiological framework.
These models have become widespread in palaeobiology as they provide a reconstruction of a fossil occurrence's geographic coordinates at time of dep...
Ecological niche modelling is applied broadly in ecology to model a species’ niche and map suitable habitat. The approach links species’ occurrences with environmental predictors to statistically derive response curves. Although commonly applied to study extant taxa, ecological niche modelling is an emerging method in palaeobiology, providing oppor...
The latitudinal biodiversity gradient (LBG), in which species richness
decreases from tropical to polar regions, is a pervasive pattern of the
modern biosphere. Although the distribution of fossil occurrences suggests
this pattern has varied through deep time, the recognition of palaeobiogeographic patterns is hampered by geological and anthropogen...
The availability of large-scale occurrence databases has revolutionized palaeobiology, allowing for investigation of diversity and macroecological trends through deep-time. However, the problem of data absence (i.e. does the lack of a fossil occurrence indicate genuine absence or imperfect detection?) has hindered studies, and potentially biased ou...
Reconstructions of global palaeoclimate are widely used to test evolutionary hypotheses and to act as a baseline against projected global warming, but their accuracy is hampered by uneven spatial sampling. Whilst the palaeontological community has accounted for
biases through estimates of sample-standardized diversity, less attention has been given...
Modern zooxanthellate coral (Z-coral) biodiversity decreases from tropical to polar regions. This latitudinal biodiversity gradient (LBG) is remarkably pervasive across numerous extant taxonomic groups. However, projected global warming of 2.0–4.8°C will have profound impacts on the distribution of organisms’ abundance, diversity, and habitats, as...
Reef corals are currently undergoing climatically driven poleward range expansions, with some evidence for equatorial range retractions. Predicting their response to future climate scenarios is critical to their conservation, but ecological models are based only on short-term observations. The fossil record provides the only empirical evidence for...
In the lead-up to the Cretaceous/Paleogene mass extinction, dinosaur diversity is argued to have been either in long-term decline, or thriving until their sudden demise. The latest Cretaceous (Campanian–Maastrichtian [83–66 Ma]) of North America provides the best record to address this debate, but even here diversity reconstructions are biased by u...
Conservation biologists use ecological niche models (ENMs) to estimate the impact of climate change on species’ distributions. This approach attempts to establish the fundamental niche of a species. However, most ENMs are calibrated solely on modern occurrences, which are intrinsically biased/incomplete in geographic and environmental space. Such E...
