Newton Fund - Wallacea ProgrammeNewton Fund - Wallacea ProgrammeOngoing and future land-use change threatens Wallacea’s unique and iconic mammals, including the anoa, a species of dwarf buffalo, and the babirusa, a bizarre tusked-pig.
To understand the possible impacts of deforestation on the genetic health of these animals, a team from Queen Mary University of London, the Natural History Museum and Universitas Indonesia is obtaining genomic information from bones held in museums.
Populations of both species show evidence of declining genetic health. By using specimens from the 1800s, the researchers will assess whether these trends result from recent forest loss, or are a legacy of climate change during the last glaciation.
To understand how Wallacea’s unique taxa will react to environmental change we need detailed models of historical, contemporary and future drivers of diversity. Researchers led by Aberdeen and Bangor Universities and Institut Pertanian Bogor (IPB) show how geological upheaval has had a major impact on the distribution of Wallacea’s biodiversity.
An important aspect of the collaboration has been to improve models of current niches, which are being used to predict possible species distributions in the future.
The team has produced software to help determine which aspects of climate, if any, can be used to predict future distributions for any species of interest. Sulawesi in particular provides many endemic species as model organisms for the models.
To understand the impact of future environmental change on evolutionary processes, the researchers are developing more detailed models for terrestrial and freshwater systems.
Herrera‐Alsina et al. 2021. Ancient geological dynamics impact neutral biodiversity accumulation and are detectable in phylogenetic reconstructions. Global Ecology and Biogeography. 30, 1633-1642
Osborne et al. 2021. Fauxcurrence: simulating multi-species occurrences for null models in species distribution modelling and biogeography. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.22.440999
