Biogeography, Changing Climates and Niche Evolution

Organized by David Wake, Elizabeth Hadly and David Ackerly

This colloquium was held December 11-13, 2008 in Irvine, CA and examined what lies ahead in evolutionary studies of the nature of niches of organisms in space and time one century after Joseph Grinnell laid out a vision for studying the distributions of organisms in a changing world.  The two day meeting addressed the questions of how we can use new tools and methodologies, newly generated robust phylogenies, rapidly growing databases in biodiversity informatics, evidence of the impact of changing environments, and evolving perspectives on niches to predict future patterns of distribution and even evolution from the perspectives of ecology, paleontology, phylogenetics, and biodiversity informatics dealing with microbes, plants and animals and organized under four major topics:

1.  Organisms, Geography, Climate and Evolution: Homage to Joseph Grinnell
2.  The Distribution of Organisms and their Niches
3.  Niche Evolution and Changing Environments
4.  Climate Change and its Prospects

View speaker list and presentation recordings.