Alexander Skeels

I am a evolutionary biologist and biogeographer currently working as a postdoc in the Macroevolution and Macroecology Group at the Australian National University (ANU). Before this, I did a postdoc in the Ecosystems and Landscape Evolution Group at ETH Zürich and the Swiss Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape (WSL), and a PhD at the ANU.

I’m interested in finding links between biogeographic diversity patterns and the macroevolutionary histories of the plant and animal clades that contribute to them. One of my main interests is the origins of biodiversity hotspots, such as those found in tropical rainforests, mountain ranges, or Mediterranean-type ecosystems. I am also interested in understanding how these regions, and the taxa found within them, are vulnerable to global change. To explore these topics, I analyse spatial, phylogenetic, and ecological trait data with simulation modelling and phylogenetic comparative approaches.