Led by Dr. Miguel B. Araújo, the Biodiversity and Global Change Lab (BIOCHANGE) brings together researchers and students who seek to further understanding in the fields of biogeography, conservation biology, global change biology, and macroecology.
Research in the lab is driven by three unifying questions: 1) how did past climate changes affect biodiversity? 2) how might current and future environmental changes affect biodiversity? 3) how can biodiversity be conserved given current and future challenges? To address these questions researchers in the lab use large climate and species distributions databases, descriptions of behavioural and physiological traits of species, phylogenies and the fossil record. Most research involves statistical analyses of ecological data, including data mining and bioclimate modelling.
Dr. Araújo’s team is located in the ‘Department of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology’ at the ‘Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales’ in Madrid (CSIC) and the University of Évora in Portugal. The latter is pat of the endowed ‘Rui Nabeiro’ Biodiversity Chair. The Museum is the oldest and highest profile natural sciences’ research facility in Spain. Its main objectives are to describe the biological and geological diversity of the planet, to study processes that generate and maintain them, and to promote biodiversity conservation. The Museum is part of the CSIC, which is the world’s 10th highest-cited institution in the fields of ecology and environment.
