Isabel Sanmartín Bastida

I am an evolutionary biologist interested in the theory and methods of biogeographical inference. One of my research interest is the analysis of macroevolutionary patterns across a diverse array of organisms (plants, animals, fungi) and biogeographical settings (continents, islands, intracontinental). I also pioneered the development of statistical approaches in biogeography based on process models, especially Bayesian inference methods. Applied to metabases of phylogenetic data, these methods offer new insights onto the formation of biomes, such as the importance of "concerted " dispersal in shaping plant distributions, or the different role played by ecology and geography in the assemblage of faunas and floras.

My lab focuses on studying the evolutionary and ecological processes behind general patterns of biodiversity, with special focus on endemism, rarity and geographical disjunctions. We used a combination of phylogenetic and genomic data, geographical databases, fossil evidence, paleoclimatic reconstructions, and morphological characterization. Our methodological approach uses the Bayesian Inference framework to integrate these different sources, and associated uncertainty. Our latests projects focus on understanding the role of climatic extinction over deep time scales, and their effect at community levels, such as the observed pattern of species depauperation in many African lineages compared with their Neotropical counterparts, which has been attributed to historical and ongoing aridification.