Nicholas J. Matzke

TL;DR: Differences between fossil and modern data and the addition of recently available palaeontological information influence understanding of the current extinction crisis, and results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record.

TL;DR: Evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence is reviewed, highlighting the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions.

TL;DR: The re-implementing of the Dispersal-Extinction-Cladogenesis model of LAGRANGE is modified to create a new model, DEC + J, which adds founder-event speciation, the importance of which is governed by a new free parameter, and the results indicate that the assumptions of historical biogeography models can have large impacts on inference and require testing and comparison with statistical methods.

TL;DR: This work uses BioGeoBEARS on a large sample of island and non-island clades to show that founder-event speciation is a crucial process in almost every clade, and that most published datasets reject the non-J models currently in widespread use.

TL;DR: A Bayesian approach for inferring biogeographic history that extends the application of biogeographical models to the analysis of more realistic problems that involve a large number of areas, and develops this approach in a Bayesian framework, marginalizing over all possible biogeography histories using Markov chain Monte Carlo.