My original research background is quantitative biogeography, namely the study of biodiversity patterns and what is now called Conservation Biogeography. Since I have been working with insects, and in Mediterranean areas, I am especially aware of the big drawbacks of biodiversity data: scarceness, inaccuracy and taxonomic and geographic bias. Due to these problems, my research as a PhD student, and part of my postdoctoral work, has been focused on sampling effort assessment, survey planning, biodiversity estimators (especially species richness) and predictive modelling.

Currently my main research interests concern the whys and wherefores of biodiversity from an assemblage (and biogeographic) perspective. I intend to investigate the processes under the assembly of local communities and the influence of regional biotas in these processes, but also how and why some communities might present higher resilience to environmental changes. Some evidence points to the ability of some ecosystems or communities to maintain their structure in spite of important climate changes, in a process related to local (and regional) diversity. Recent research on natural experiments and theoretical models has related higher diversity (i.e. species richness) with improved ecosystem functioning (i.e., long-term productivity). In addition, some paleontological evidence suggest that community structure (i.e., structure of functional groups) might have remained relatively stable in some particular places, in spite of important variations in species composition during the dramatic climatic changes of the Pleistocene.

Assuming that diversity improves ecosystem functioning and resilience to changes, some of the richer communities (or those receiving more contributions from their regional pools) could maintain their structure through time, presenting resistance to climate changes (and other impacts) to some extent. If this is true, it will have some important implications for conservation and for research on global change biology. The core of my research at the Centre for Population Biology is to investigate to what extent this hypothesis is true, using both recent and fossil data. These ideas will be if this application is successful. I would like to answer to the following specific questions:

• Are some assemblage characteristics more stable than species distributions through climate changes?
• Which community characteristics and/or mechanisms improve their stability and/or resilience to environmental changes?
• What are the characteristics of the places where resilient communities do appear?
• Which kind of assembly processes result in more resilient communities?

The quality of the description of large-scale processes related to biological assemblages relies on data quality and on the accuracy of the methods and variables used to describe the characteristics of these assemblages. Thus, I continue to work on practical issues related to

• species richness estimators
• sampling effort assessment
• biodiversity surrogates
• predictive modelling.

I am also interested in the geographic and temporal patterns of biodiversity and related processes. Here, I am currently working on island biogeography and large scale studies (from regional to global extents), especially at the Macaronesian Archipelagos and the Western Palearctic, where I'm leading a Working Group on the determinants of Western Palearctic Diversity). In these areas I am studying the determinants of richness, composition and ecological characteristics of the assemblages, and of diversification processes, including energy, other environmental characteristics, and regional and biogeographical factors.

I've been recently appointed as subject editor in Ecography.

Also, I'm currently the editor-in-chief of Frontiers of Biogeography (the former IBS Newsletter), the scientific magazine of the IBS (International Biogeography Society).

You can find additional information at my researcher ID.

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