Biodiversity origins
Simulating the co-evolution of planets and life
BIGEST – The origins of global tetrapod diversity
An enormous variety of mechanisms have been proposed to explain one of the world’s most fascinating and ubiquitous biodiversity patterns – the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG). However, we still lack a complete understanding of how such broad scale patterns of biodiversity emerge over deep timescales. The BIGEST project aims to use eco-evolutionary simulations to investigate how different classical hypotheses for the LDG generate biodiversity gradients in four classes of terrestrial tetrapods (birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles).
The biogeodynamics project aims to understand the complex co-evolution of Earth’s biosphere, climate and topography since the emergence of life by coupling models of the respective domains.
The planetary evolution project aims to reproduce the dynamic of living organisms in silico using a new generation of models that integrates spatially explicit dispersal with eco-evolutionary dynamics and speciation.