What drives historical biodiversity?

Sebastian Höhna

Section of Evolutionary Biology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany - hoehna@bio.lmu.de

One of the major questions in evolutionary biology concerns the study of biodiversity. In my research, I'm interested in understanding what are the driving forces behind the process that generates biodiversity through time and space (e.g., rapid radiations, key innovations and mass extinctions). In my recent work we have focused on two main aspects: diversification-rate variation through time and diversification-rate variation among lineages. Diversification-rate variation through time affects all lineages equally within a group and might be driven by environmental factors (external/abiotic). On the other hand, diversification-rate variation affects only a subset of lineages and might be driven by lineage-specific factors (biotic). These processes can be studied through the fossil record and/or phylogenies estimated from molecular data. Most of my work has been focused on estimating diversification rates from molecular phylogenies but in recent work we have extended existing methods to include both extant and extinct taxa. In this talk, I will present an overview over recent advances in modeling and estimating diversification rates through time and space.

Recent publications:

S Höhna, T Stadler, F Ronquist and T Britton (2011) Inferring speciation and extinction rates under different species sampling schemes. Molecular Biology and Evolution 28: 2577-2589.

S Höhna, MJ Landis, TA Heath, B Boussau, BR Moore, N Lartillot, JP Huelsenbeck and F Ronquist (2016) RevBayes: Bayesian phylogenetic inference using graphical models and an Interactive model-specification language. Systematic Biology 65: 726-736.

BR Moore, S Höhna, MR May, B Rannala and JP Huelsenbeck (2016) Critically evaluating the theory and performance of Bayesian analysis of macroevolutionary mixtures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 113: 9569-9574.

FL Condamine, J Rolland, S Höhna, FAH Sperling, and I Sanmartín (2018) Testing the role of the Red Queen and Court Jester as drivers of the macroevolution of Apollo butterflies. Systematic Biology 67: 940-964.