Simon VERON

Spécialité : Species extinctions - Phylogenetic diversity - Evolutionary distinctiveness - Biogeography - Community ecology

Présentation de la recherche :

Processes of competition, environmental filtering, dispersal limitation, colonization, invasion, speciation and extinction may be disentangled by adding the analysis of phylogenetic information to ecological studies. A second interest of my research is then to better understand patterns of plant diversity in islands thanks to their evolutionary history.

Indeed, in islands, life in isolation has allowed evolution to take its own course resulting in very peculiar fauna and flora (but depending on the organisms and islands considered). Especially more than 70,000 plant species are endemic to islands. Moreover because there is a lack of representatives of entire taxonomic groups, ecological niches are occupied by organisms totally different of those playing the same role in continental areas. We still lack documented patterns at large scale in order to understand the main drivers shaping island biodiversity. I aim to use phylogenetic approaches to understand plant diversity patterns in islands with applications in community ecology and conservation biology. I aim to identify centres of evolutionary endemism where ancient and range-restricted lineages concentrate, to understand and describe the drivers conducting to different diversity patterns between islands and continents. As islands are particularly vulnerable to species extinctions, I will also study the impacts of climate change on insular plant diversity.