Welcome!

Cássia is an evolutionary biogeographer, interested in eco-genomics and diversification of plant family Apocynaceae, and in the evolutionary history of the flora of outcrops in old landscapes of South America (e.g. Campo Rupestre and Canga). Currently, she is a Newton International Fellow (The Royal Society) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, working with Eimear Nic Lughadha, Felix Forest, Alex Antonelli and Justin Moat. By investigating biogeography and traits among different lineages of flowering plants, and improving the resolution of molecular phylogenies using NGS approaches, she aims to understand the evolution of flora in old landscapes. She will also compare species and areas at risk to provide information relevant to conservation management.

Keywords: Asclepiadoideae, outcrops, phylogenomics, biogeography, conservation.

Victor Dekleck is the Director of Science for the World Forest ID not-for-profit. He leads the World Forest ID science team on developing timber and forest risk commodity identification and tracing technologies, data integration, and machine learning efforts.

Olivia is a biodiversity genomics research assistant based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Olivia has a background in conservation and population genetics and is currently working on a number of research projects within the group, including an orchid phylogenomics project with Oscar Pérez Escobar.

Ian is a quantitative ecologist with 5 years of experience in research fields related to biogeography, forest ecology, movement ecology and surface hydrology. He has worked on modelling the dispersal and migration of wild populations; estimating and mapping the impact of climate change on the decline of species populations; and developing efficient, statistical, modelling and mapping tools for predicting the distribution of species. Ian has a master’s degree in Biostatistics & Modelling.

Hubert is a naturalist with experience in a diversity of systems, from the tropics to the arctic. He is particularly passionate about tropical biodiversity, and how to protect and restore it. Currently he is working with diverse stakeholders to reforested degraded agricultural landscapes in Panama and Mexico. His research involves landscape-scale multi-taxa biodiversity monitoring, aiming to understand the cost-effectiveness of monitoring different biodiversity indicators in the context of reforestation. He is also one of the co-founders of Mothbox, an automated light trap for monitoring nocturnal insects. Hubert’s PhD at the University of Gothenburg is supervised by Alex Antonelli, Daniel Zuleta, and Daisy Dent, and is a collaboration with Ponterra, a reforestation project developer.

Emke is an industrial ecologist with a background in biology. She is interested in the impacts of land use and land transformations on biodiversity, specifically from product and production systems. Her work is focused primarily on the identification and development of models for the inclusion of biodiversity indicators into life-cycle assessment (LCA), which is a frequently used decision support tool for the systematic evaluation of the environmental aspects of a product or service system through all stages of its life cycle (from cradle to grave). Emke is a PhD student at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg under the main supervision of Ulrika Palme and co-supervised by Alex Antonelli.

Allison is the Director of the Lund University Botanical Garden. She was previously the Project Manager for the Antonelli Lab (2017-2022) and the Director of the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre (2020-2022). She studied ecology (BSc, 2008) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and protist systematics (PhD, 2013) at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. She then worked as a visiting researcher in tree fern systematics and biogeography, also at Uppsala University. In 2015 she started Forest Cat Editing, which works with academic editing and communication. While operating her company as a “digital nomad” from nearly two dozen countries, Allison further developed her interest in scientific communication and outreach. This eventually led her back to Gothenburg to work with the Antonelli Lab and to help start the new biodiversity centre. She co-edited the book Mountains, Climate and Biodiversity with Alexandre Antonelli and Carina Hoorn (Wiley, 2018), and has authored a number of scientific and popular science articles. Her main expertise is in scientific management and leadership, as well as communication and outreach on biodiversity and conservation. Allison is an avid traveler and adventurer, hiker, SCUBA diver, mushroom connoisseur, fossil hunter and all-around nerd.

Weston is a former postdoc in the Antonelli Lab where he focused on understanding how habitat loss is impacting species distributions and driving extinction amongst the vascular plant flora on the island of Hispaniola. Now Assistant Curator of Pteridophytes at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois, USA, he is especially interested in the role of hybridization and polyploidy as forces shaping fern and lycophyte diversity in the American tropics and diversity of the clubmoss family (Lycopodiaceae). To address these questions, he works extensively with natural history collections and integrates systematics, taxonomy, biogeography, phylogenomics, and functional ecology.

Naomi is a quantitative ecologist with a background in statistics and machine learning. For her PhD she is working on the development of an automated approach for estimating the probability that a species has gone extinct, with a focus on the use of digitised herbarium data for the inference of plant extinction. Naomi is particularly interested in the possible applications of machine learning methods to extinction probability modelling. She is based at Stockholm University, under the supervision of Aelys Humphreys and co-supervised by Alex Antonelli, Diana Fisher, Jon Norberg and Daniele Silvestro.

Natalia is a specialist in archaeogenomics, population genomics and plant domestication. A former postdoc of the Antonelli Lab based in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, she is now Lecturer in Bioinformatics at the University of Portsmouth but continuing collaborative research on orchid and coca phylogenomics and the domestication of useful plants.

Sandeep is a Marie Curie postdoc interested in the ecological and evolutionary processes underpinning the high floristic diversity in mountain ranges such as the Himalaya. He aims to integrate insights from palynology, phylogenomics, and advanced mapping techniques for biodiversity conservation in the mountains. Sandeep is jointly supervised by Carina Hoorn and Daniel Kissling at the University of Amsterdam, Fabien Condamine at CNRS, France and Alex Antonelli at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Mafe is interested in phylogeography and biodiversity in the Neotropics, mainly involving ant-plant mutualisms as her subject of study. She was a postdoc at the University of Gothenburg working with the Amazonian palm Geonoma. By studying the genetic and ecological differences between morphotypes of Geonoma macrostachys, she aims to understand the mechanisms behind ecological speciation in plants. She is interested in using NGS data to infer plants’ evolutionary histories at the population and species levels. She is currently a senior researcher at Vilnius University where she is focusing on conservation genomics.

Keywords: palms, ant-plant, Neotropics, phylogenomics, phylogeography

Úrsula Medeiros is an ecologist and PhD student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil), whose research focuses on vegetation structure, remote sensing, and carbon stocks in tropical ecosystems. Her work integrates airborne laser scanning (ALS) data to identify structural metrics that describe forest vertical complexity, support biomass estimation, and model aboveground carbon, with a particular focus on the Atlantic Forest. She is currently conducting fieldwork in the Florist National Forest of Nísia Floresta (Rio Grande do Norte), where she collaborates with the PPBio program to analyze species composition and vegetation structure in long-term monitoring plots. Her broader interests include landscape ecology, conservation planning, and the use of spatial technologies to understand environmental dynamics in tropical forests. Her research is supervised by Professor Alice Calvente and Professor Alex Antonelli.

Oscar is Research Leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, working on orchid phylogenomics and evolution. His main research interests are centred towards understanding the macroevolutionary dynamics of Neotropical orchids.

Rhian is based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and coordinates Alex Antonelli’s research programme. She obtained a first class degree in Ecology and Environmental Management at Cardiff University and then went on to do a PhD in population biology and conservation genetics and a Postgraduate Diploma in Statistics at Trinity College Dublin (PGradDip; Distinction), while also working as a Senior Ecologist for Natura Environmental Consultants. She has been at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew for 18 years, conducting postdoctoral work on orchid population genetics and the phylogeny of the plant family Haemodoraceae before moving into science education and communication. She was the first Kew director of the MSc in Plant and Fungal Taxonomy, Diversity and Conservation, delivered with Queen Mary University of London. Alongside her current position as Senior Science Editor, she is responsible for coordinating the strategic development and management of Alex Antonelli’s research programme at Kew.

Jakub is working on algorithms for large-scale phylogenetic reconstruction. He is also interested in applying machine learning to problems in genomics and biodiversity. His background is in algorithms, phylogenetics and machine learning.