1. Investigating how climatic niches change over evolutionary timescales is a necessary step
to understanding the current distribution of lineages, yet few studies have addressed this …

Assessing whether behavioural, ecological or geographical factors trigger population
divergence provides key insights into the biological processes driving speciation. Recent …

Species delimitation offered by DNA-based approaches can provide important insights into
the natural history and diversity of species, but the cogency of such processes is limited …

Due to their widespread distribution, range of adaptations, local abundance, and species
diversity, ants are a major component of terrestrial communities worldwide. However, such …

The aim of this thesis is to study phylogeny, species-wide phylogeography and genetic
diversity in Formica ants across Eurasia in connection with the history of biotic responses to …

A new collection of 24 wingless ant specimens from mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber
(Albian-Cenomanian, 99 Ma) comprises nine new species belonging to the genus …

Aim The standard latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG), in which species richness decreases
from equator to pole, is a pervasive pattern observed in most organisms. Some lineages …

Aim Global conservation planning is often oriented around vertebrates and plants, yet most
organisms are invertebrates. To explore the potential conservation implications of this bias …

The creation of geographic barriers has long been suspected to contribute to the formation
of new species. We investigated the phylogeography of desert ants in the western …

Adaptive radiations are of particular interest owing to what they reveal about the ecological
and evolutionary regulation of biodiversity. This applies to localized island radiations such …