NBIA Colloquium - Carsten Rahbek

Speaker: Carsten Rahbek (GLOBE Institute, Copenhagen University)

Title: Why is Earth so biologically diverse? Mountains hold the answer.

Abstract: Life on Earth is amazingly diverse, and much of this diversity lies in a rich variety of geographical patterns. What determines these global patterns has been a puzzle for scientists since the days of von Humboldt, Darwin, and Wallace. Yet, despite two centuries of research, this question remains unanswered. The talk will discuss the role of mountains in determining global patterns of biodiversity and outline The Humboldt’s Enigma of why mountains display such extraordinary biodiversity. Although it is evident that much of the global variation in biodiversity is so clearly driven by the extraordinary richness of tropical mountain regions, it is this very richness that current biodiversity models cannot explain. Mountains are simply too rich in species, and we are falling short of explaining global hot-spots of biodiversity. The talk will focus on global to regional and local scales; the latter focusing on our work in the Andes. I will briefly describe my Villum Center for Global Mountain Biodiversity, where a combination of old-fashion rubber-boot fieldwork in conjunction with space-technology, big-scale genomic sequencing, mathematical and statistical simulation models and big data on distributions and phylogenies of 10,000’s of species that will be applied to answer the question of what determine the distribution and diversity of life on Earth.

Bio-sketch: Carsten Rahbek is a Professor in Biodiversity and Director of the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate and Director of the Villum Center for Global Mountain Biodiversity, both at the GLOBE Institute, University of Copenhagen. He holds four professor appointments in Denmark, UK and China – and is a world-leading scientist with key research in biodiversity focusing on what determines distribution and diversity of life on Earth. He has published >400 scientific articles on Biodiversity, including 28 in Science and Nature (including three front-cover articles and two special issues), and also conduct research in economy, climate and human health. He was awarded the annual prize for research in natural sciences by the Danish Association of Masters and PhDs (2019), the Villum Kann Rasmussen Annual Prize for Technical and Scientific Research (2012) and the Danish Elite Researcher Prize (2010). In 2020, he was knighted by the Danish Royal House receiving the Order of the Dannebrog.

Refreshments in Aud. C after the talk.