Today we are welcoming two new Associate Editors to Methods in Ecology and Evolution: Samantha Price (University of California, Davis, USA) and Andrés Baselga (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain).
Samantha Price
“My research seeks to answer the question ‘What regulates biodiversity?’. I use phylogenetic and comparative methods to investigate the abiotic and biotic drivers of global patterns of ecomorphological and lineage diversity over long periods of time and across large clades of vertebrates. To work at this macro-scale I tap the reserves of scientific data in museum collections, published literature, as well as online databases using data and techniques from across ecology, evolution, organismal biology, palaeobiology and data science. ”
Samantha will be joining the Board as our sixth Applications Editor. In July, she had an article titled ‘The Impact of Organismal Innovation on Functional and Ecological Diversification‘ published in Integrative and Comparative Biology. The paper introduces a framework for studying biological innovations in an evolutionary context. Earlier in the year, Sam was the first author of the article ‘A promising future for integrative biodiversity research: An increased role of scale-dependency and functional biology‘, published in Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences. In this article, the authors argue that, given its direct relevance to the current biodiversity crisis, greater integration is needed across biodiversity research.
Andrés Baselga
“I am broadly interested in biodiversity. My background includes a PhD on beetle taxonomy. Later on I focused on biogeography and macroecology, particularly on beta diversity patterns and their underlying processes. This has led me to develop novel methods to quantify the dissimilarity between assemblages, aiming to improve our ability to infer the driving processes. With this objective, I am also interested in the integration of phylogenetic information to quantify macroecological patterns at multiple hierarchical levels (from genes to species, i.e. multi-hierarchical macroecology).”
Andrés has been an active author and reviewer for Methods in Ecology and Evolution over the past few years. He was the lead author of the article ‘Comparing methods to separate components of beta diversity‘, which tested whether the replacement components derived from the BAS and POD frameworks are independent of richness difference. This article was also the basis for one of the most popular posts we have ever had on this blog: ‘What is Beta Diversity?‘. In addition to this, Andrés was the lead author of ‘Multi-hierarchical macroecology at species and genetic levels to discern neutral and non-neutral processes‘, published in Global Ecology and Biogeography in 2015. The paper proposed that the patterns emerging across multiple hierarchical levels can be used to discern the effects of neutral and non-neutral macroecological processes, which otherwise have proven difficult to separate.
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