Biodiversity is distributed unevenly across the globe. As human-driven environmental change accelerates, understanding the processes that generate and maintain this diversity has become more urgent than ever. Despite decades of research, key questions remain: Why is biodiversity concentrated in certain regions and clades? What mechanisms allow it to persist over time? And how vulnerable is it to the unprecedented pressures of a rapidly changing world? Recent advances in computational power combined with centuries of natural history collections, cutting-edge remote sensing technologies, and global citizen science initiatives now enable us to map and study biodiversity in ways that were once unimaginable. My research leverages these advancements to unravel the complex processes shaping diversity patterns, both across and within species, and to better predict the challenges posed by rapid environmental change. In this talk, I will share three key insights from my research using global datasets to examine the past, present, and future of biodiversity.
First, I will examine how macroevolutionary and macroecological processes have shaped the distribution of evolutionarily unique and geographically rare species, emphasizing the role of mountains as cradles of biodiversity. Second, based on long-term resurvey data, I will present evidence that temperate species have already experienced more warm-edge local extirpations due to ongoing climate change than tropical species, challenging long-standing assumptions about the vulnerability of tropical species to climate change. Finally, I will show how the rising frequency, duration, and intensity of short-term extreme heat events (i.e., heatwaves), driven by climate change, are likely to reshape biodiversity patterns in the future.