Development of methods for the study of biodiversity based on modeling biogeographic patterns

Abstract

Understanding the factors affecting the spatial structure of biodiversity at various levels of biological organization is one of the main goals for ecologist. This thesis aims to develop new methodologies to study the mechanisms driving the spatial distribution of biological diversity as inferred from biogeographical and macroecological patterns. It explores the usefulness of a sigmoidal function to fit the distance-decay pattern and how its shape change with the species distribution size, a test statistic for parameters comparison, the application of these methods to study current large-scale diversity pattern of European spiders and the extension of these methods to study the genetic-spatial distance relationship, using endemic species of Iberian leaf beetles as case-study.