Biodiversity Conservation

We are interested in the historical events, anthropogenic, paleoclimatic and geomorphological processes that shape evolutionary histories of mammals from all of the Earth’s major terrestrial biomes, particularly the ways these affect genetic variation, past population dynamics, adaptive capacity and extinction risk. For comprehensive sampling of natural populations and range-wide population and conservation genomics, we rely on banked, cryopreserved cell lines, as well as large museum collections and scientific expeditions to the field.

Representative publications on this topic include:

1. Joana L. Rocha, Pedro Silva, Nuno Santos, et al. (2023). North-African fox genomes show signatures of repeated introgression and adaptation to life in deserts. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 10.1038/s41559-023-02094-w
2. Joana L. Rocha*, Pedro Vaz Pinto*, Hans R. Siegismund, et al. (2022). African climate and geomorphology drive evolution and ghost introgression in sable antelope. Molecular Ecology (cover). 10.1111/mec.16427
   *co-first authors