PhD seminar: Species-Area Relationships : a central tool for ecological studies and conservation applications.

François Ghilhaumon: Palácio Vimioso, 22 of June of 2011, 15h00.

One of the most ancient and ubiquitous patterns that has been recognized in ecology is the increase in species richness (S) with increasing sampling area (A): the Species-Area relationship (SAR). The SAR has been mystifying ecologists for more than 150 years and its modeling remains a central issue for theoretical ecologists and conservationists. Inference about the SAR is mandatory in the wide range of conservation applications that require the comparison of diversity patterns when regions differ in area, such as global scale conservation priority-setting schemes.

In this seminary I will review 1) the principal mechanisms responsible for the SAR, 2) the main uses of the SAR in conservation biology and 3) the challenges associated with the plasticity of the pattern across organism and environment types. I will then present recent tools for SAR modeling and an application to the detection of richness hotspots at the global scale.