Biodiversity Seminar: New Models to Infer the Origin, Evolution, and Future Dynamics of Biodiversity

Throughout the long evolutionary history of life, species of all kingdoms have undergone staggering diversification and faced countless environmental changes and extinction events. Since the great majority of species that lived on Earth have since gone extinct, it is difficult to infer how the evolution of biodiversity unfolded over billions of years. Today, with over a million species threatened with extinction, biodiversity is facing unprecedented challenges, urging the need for conservation policies that maximize its protection and sustain its manifold contributions to people. Here we present a suite of new supervised and unsupervised models with applications in evolutionary and conservation biology. Specifically, we develop Bayesian and deep learning models to infer species richness dynamics in deep time, and test hypotheses on past speciation and extinction. We then develop probabilistic methods to predict the effect of forecasted extinctions on biodiversity and compare future trends with historical extinction trajectories. Finally, we introduce a novel framework for spatial conservation prioritization based on reinforcement learning that can quantify the trade-offs between the costs and benefits of area and biodiversity protection. We explore the power of AI-driven conservation strategies against alternatives based on standard biodiversity metrics toward the targets set by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Coupling artificial intelligence with evolutionary models holds great promise for advancing our understanding of biodiversity and its evolution across time scales, and for improving biodiversity conservation and restoration action in a rapidly changing and resource-limited world.

Daniele Silvestro is an Assistant Professor at the University of Fribourg. He and his group "Computational Evolutionary and Conservation Biology" develop computational methods and software to study evolutionary processes across different organisms including plants, vertebrates, and invertebrate groups.

Our seminars are hybrid. Please send an email to events-biodiversity(at)wsl.ch if you would like to get access to the live stream.

The Biodiversity Seminar Series are organized by the WSL Biodiversity Center. Every two weeks, we aim to host a seminar speaker that presents research or outreach on topics relevant to the biodiversity community at WSL. The seminars are public and are usually broadcasted online.

Find out more about the WSL Biodiversity Center and a complete list of events here.

Please send an email to events-biodiversity(at)wsl.ch if you would like to be updated on the activities of the WSL Biodiversity Center.