The ‘smaller majority’ of the Udzungwa Mountains

Resum: Understanding the mechanisms behind community assembly is no trivial task. One must consider processes such as adaptation, speciation and movement, and use data on the ecological and evolutionary relationships among organisms, and on the interactions with their physical environment. Elevational gradients offer one powerful tool to disentangle the relative effects of these processes because the zones or bands along a gradient represent different conditions across which species composition and abundances vary.

For the past few years, my collaborators and I have been investigating community assembly processes using spider communities as a model. By combining habitat-related physical and (functional and phylogenetic) community structure data we are looking into the way climate and geography, habitat use and dispersal all interact to determine how species are filtered into communities.

In this talk I will present our findings on the spatial changes in the spider communities of our model system: the Udzungwa Mountains, part of the Eastern Arc Mountains (EAM), Tanzania. From evolutionary and conservation points of view, the EAM are particularly exciting as they form an inland archipelago with a history at least as fascinating as that of the Galápagos Islands, and they contain some of the oldest and most stable forests of Africa and some of the most endemism-rich forests in the world.

Ponent: Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte, PhD, Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhaguen.

Idioma vehicular: anglès.

Lloc: sala d’actes del Castell dels Tres Dragons (Laboratori de Natura, pg. Picasso, s/n)

Muntanyes d’Udzungwa. Imatge d’ourtrip2009

Dins el programa de Seminaris de Biodiversitat, SEMBIO. Debat i intercanvi d’experiències essencialment sobre sistemàtica, zoologia, evolució animal i filogènia molecular. Aquestes xerrades estan organitzades pel Grup de Recerca Consolidat ZooSysEvo format per científics de la Facultat de Biologia i del Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona. L’objectiu és difondre els continguts de la recerca d’investigadors del grup o d’algun investigador convidat.