Research Line: Evolutionary Patterns and Processes
The Evolutionary Patterns and Processes line integrates landscape genetics, biogeography, macroevolution, and behavioural ecology to understand how biological diversity and patterns of variation arise and are maintained across space and time.
A central focus is the study of species radiations and their biogeographic history. The team investigates the diversification of Cataglyphis desert ants across the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, revealing how geological events such as the Messinian Salinity Crisis have shaped phylogenetic structure and geographic distribution. At a broader geographic scale, the line includes research on the phylogenies and biogeographic patterns of small mammals across Sundaland (Southeast Asia), a region of exceptional diversity where fluctuating sea levels and island configurations have driven complex patterns of speciation and faunal exchange. The BURSTS project further extends this macroevolutionary perspective by merging comparative and community phylogenetic approaches to explore links between ecological processes and evolutionary radiations in the New World across both deep-time and observable timescales.
Landscape genetics and conservation genomics form another cornerstone of the line, with studies on genetic connectivity, gene flow, and local adaptation in iconic species including the Iberian wolf, Iberian lynx, and bearded vulture.
The line also encompasses behavioural ecology and ethology, examining how individual and social behaviours shape fitness and evolutionary trajectories across taxa.
To address these questions, the team deploys a broad methodological toolkit spanning long-term fieldwork, genomics and phylogenomics, stable isotope analyses, laboratory and field-based experiments, and biogeographic and phylogenetic modelling.
