Personal information
Biography
When I started my PhD in 2007 phylogeographic research was heavily biased towards mobile animals and terrestrial paradigms dominated despite the very different environmental settings and biological communities found in the sea. This led me to focus on a different biological model – a low-dispersal macroalgae - and on the development of new conceptual models to explain differences in genetic composition and diversity across marine species ranges. During these formative years I have published several influential papers (>120 citations) linking climatic shifts and extant phylogeographic patterns, emphasising the role of poorly understood demographic-genetic (e.g. gene-surfing) effects. At this stage, idiosyncratic differences among related macroalgae sharing similar habitats, dispersal ecologies and distributions also became apparent. A key goal of my 2012-2018 post-doc project was precisely to disentangle individualistic vs community responses of macroalgae assemblages to large-scale climatic perturbations.
In the past years I have been analysing with molecular markers several assemblages with contrasting thermal affinities and distributions. I published several case studies and led a book-chapter review showing how glacial-interglacial cycles act to erase, concentrate, differentiate or homogenize gene pools across different parts of species ranges, and how extant climatic refugia are threatened by ongoing climatic change. Genetic work also revealed that hybridization can be an important evolutionary process in macroalgae evolution. Key findings include the introgression and even replacement of native organelle genomes among Fucus species and the description for the first time of marine hybrid polyploids among Pelvetiopsis.
In more recent years I have been trying to consolidate these research lines and expanding them into new directions, integrating more closely classical phylogeographic approaches with niche modelling and NGS data, embracing new models (e.g. southern African and Mediterranean endemics) and exploring novel biogeographical settings and hypotheses.
Activities
Employment (1)
Education and qualifications (2)
Funding (8)
DivProtect/0006/2021
ANR-16-EBI3-0005-01
SFRH/BPD/88935/2012
PTDC/AAC-CLI/109108/2008
SFRH/BD/31017/2006
POCI/MAR/57499/2004
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