Laura Antão graduated by the University of Aveiro and the University of St Andrews, under the supervision of Dr Maria Dornelas and Professor Amadeu Soares, and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, published in the high impact journal Science under BDio&CESAM´s affiliation.The work is about the rapid change on biodiversity driven by climate change and other human influences. The team analysed the global patterns in temporal change in biodiversity using a large quantity of time-series data from different regions (the data include many different ecosystems across continents and cover the marine, terrestrial and freshwater realms (BioTIME database*)). Their findings reveal clear spatial patterns in the rates of richness and composition change, where marine taxa exhibit the highest rates of change. The marine tropics, in particular, emerge as hotspots of species richness losses. Given that human activities are affecting biodiversity in magnitudes and directions that differ across the planet, these findings will provide a much needed biogeographic understanding of biodiversity change that can help to inform conservation prioritization.
* citation: Dornelas M, Antão LH, Moyes F, Bates, AE, Magurran, AE, et al. BioTIME: A database of biodiversity time series for the Anthropocene. Global Ecol Biogeogr. 2018; 27:760 – 786. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.12729
