MAPAS Lab published two new position offers!

1) Predoc Offer: The MAPAS LAB research group is looking for a candidate to carry out a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Sara Varela of the Faculty of Biology, University of Vigo, under the project Mapping biodiversity cradles and graves, MAPAS (H2020-ERC-2020-STG-947921), founded by the ERC Research Council.

• Experience in Matlab programming, previous research experience (bachelor thesis, master thesis), knowledge of GIS, and experience working with climate and paleoclimate data (20%).
• High level of English = B2 (it will also be assessed during the interview) (20%).
• CV (Max: 2 pages) specifying the experience in programming, statistics, palaeontology, GIS, and other related experiences in education and scientific dissemination. (30%).

• A Motivation letter (Max: 1 page) stating the reasons why the candidate wants to work at MAPAS Lab and specifying two reference persons and their contact details (attach the letter as an attached PDF to the CV) (15%).

• Personal interview. The interview will be held for those candidates who achieve a minimum of 60 points in the sum of their merits (15%).

• Gross monthly salary: 2000
• Contract term (nº of months/permanent): 25 months
• Planned start date: 01/11/2023
• Working time: Full time (37.5 h/weak)
• Detailed work schedule:  Standard Bussines Day L-V/ M-F, 9:00 – 17:00h

2) Technician Offer: MAPAS LAB is also looking for an R and GIS programming technician for a biology project.

The contract has been offered into the “16-23 Merit-based competition for hiring of research and research support personnel of the University of Vigo”, with the reference 1623-117275, and has been published at the University of Vigo online secretary.

Job description:

The person hired will work within the Map Lab research team, being responsible for programming a series of models in R to understand how species evolve in time and space. He/she will be also responsible for running different experiments to understand how species diversify. The basis of this model is ready (https://github.com/project-gen3sis). One of the goals of this work is to create a user-friendly interface for this model. In addition, the candidate is required to have experience working with GIS formats. The person recruited should enjoy working in a team in an international environment, with English as a daily working language.

Requirements:

Degree in Sciences.

Evaluation criteria

• Work experience in research, with particular emphasis on having a doctoral thesis in science, and/or previous experience in research projects, and/or previous experience in software development teams. A CV (maximum length of 2 pages) should be sent specifying functions, software and/or projects in which the candidate has participated and the specific personal contribution to each of them. (20%).
• High level of English (10%).
• Programming experience (work will be in R) and GIS experience (40%).
• A Motivation letter (Max: 1 page) stating the reasons why the candidate wants to work at MAPAS Lab and specifying two reference persons and their contact details (attach the letter as a pdf attached to the CV) (15%).
• Personal interview. The interview will be conducted in English and will include a programming test. The interview will be held for those candidates who achieve a minimum of 60 points in the sum of their merits (15%).

Conditions:

• Gross monthly salary: 2800
• Contract term (nº of months/permanent): 25 months
• Planned start date: 01/11/2023
• Working time: Full time (37.5 h/weak)
• Detailed work schedule: Standard Bussines Day L-V/ M-F, 9:00 – 17:00h

Procedure

Job offer application procedure: help file

Does Mammal Diversity Impact Amazonian Soil Carbon?
Ever wondered how mammal diversity in the Amazon affects soil carbon levels? This paper led by Maria Losada and in which our Principal Investigator Sara Varela has participated studied 83 mammal groups in Guyana’s Amazon biome. They found that mammal traits, like size and feeding habits, influence the type of organic matter in the soil. Lower trait diversity led to higher levels of specific organic matter, potentially affecting carbon storage. This insight could guide biodiversity management for more effective carbon sequestration and ecosystem balance. Exploring these connections reveals the intricate web of life’s influence on Earth’s carbon cycle.

Here is a video with a summary of the research:

Discover more about this research :

Losada, M., Sobral, M., Silvius, K. M., Varela, S., Martínez Cortizas, A. M., & V. Fragoso, J. M. (2023). Mammal traits and soil biogeochemistry: Functional diversity relates to composition of soil organic matter. Ecology and Evolution, 13(8), e10392. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.10392

Our team member Lewis A. Jones participated in a new preprint.
How does the rphylopic R package enhance data visualization for biologists by providing access to organism silhouettes from the PhyloPic database and enabling customization within R programming language?
Learn more:

Our team members Lewis A. Jones and Sara Varela participated in a new preprint manuscript published:
How do different Global Plate Models impact the reconstruction of past biogeographic patterns and climatic trends in paleobiology studies?

Learn more:

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5GD4D

Our team member Lewis A. Jones participated in a new preprint.
How does a Bayesian model combine ecological and geochemical proxy data to create accurate palaeoclimate reconstructions, bridging gaps in sparse records and reducing uncertainty?
Learn more:

Eichenseer, K. and Jones, L. A.: Bayesian multi-proxy reconstruction of early Eocene latitudinal temperature gradients, EGUsphere [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1188, 2023.

Our team member, Sofía Galvan, recently delivered an engaging seminar for the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Our IP Sara Varela participated in a research paper just published and led by Maria Losada about mammal and tree diversity through different types of soil organic matter in the northern Amazon.

Find out more about this research:

• Losada, M., Cortizas, A. M. M., Silvius, K. M., Varela, S., Raab, T. K., Fragoso, J. M., & Sobral, M. (2023). Mammal and tree diversity accumulate different types of soil organic matter in the northern Amazon. Science. 26 (3): 106088. doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.106088

Discover all MapasLab papers!

Our PI Sara Varela participated in the new research work: Better incentives are needed to reward academic software development published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Software innovation is critical for integrating, synthesizing and modelling big data in ecology and evolution, and increasingly underlies analyses in high-profile research. But we need to give better incentives to reward academic software development, including maintenance!

• Merow, C., Boyle, B., Enquist, B. J., Feng, X., Kass, J. M., Maitner, B. S., McGill, B., Owens, H., Park, D.S., Paz, A., Pinilla-Buitrago, G.E., Urban, M.C., Varela, S.  & Wilson, A. M. 2023. Better incentives are needed to reward academic software development. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1-2. doi.org/10.1038/s41559-023-02008-w

Discover all the papers by MAPAS Lab

We are thrilled to announce a remarkable achievement within our team!

Sara Gamboa, a member of our team, has won the Marie Tharp award in the postdoctoral category, organised by the CIM-UVigo Equality Commission.

The Marie Tharp Award symbolizes not only Sara’s exceptional accomplishments but also her dedication to advancing the boundaries of knowledge and fostering equality within academia. This accolade is a true reflection of her hard work, passion, and dedication to her research.

We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Sara Gamboa for this well-deserved recognition. As we celebrate this milestone, we look forward to witnessing the continued brilliance and achievements that Sara will undoubtedly contribute to our team and the broader scientific community.

Our team member Alessandro Chiarenza leads the research entitled “100 million years of turtle paleoniche dynamics enable the prediction of latitudinal range shifts in a warming world” which has been published in Current Biology.

Chiarenza, A. A., Waterson, A. M., Schmidt, D. N., Valdes, P. J., Yesson, C., Holroyd, P. A., Collinson, M.E., Farsworth, A., Nicholson, D.B., Varela, S. & Barrett, P. M. 2022. 100 million years of turtle paleoniche dynamics enable the prediction of latitudinal range shifts in a warming world. Current Biology, 33(1) 109-121, doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.056

Moreover, the research illustrated the journal cover of the first 2023 issue with a paleoart by Mauricio Anton

Our team member Alessandro Chiarenza is a co-author of the paper entitled Shifts in food webs and niche stability shaped survivorship and extinction at the end-Cretaceous published in Science Advances, you can now check our paper out now in our Research section.

In this research authors used 1600 fossil occurrences of non-marine vertebrates from North America to explore the trophic & niche dynamics across the K/Pg mass extinction in order to reconstruct food web dynamics & quantified ecological niche partitioning combining fossil data with paleoclimatic, land surface & paleogeographical envelopes, also analysing realized niche breadth.

Discover more:

García-Girón, J., Chiarenza, A. A., Alahuhta, J., DeMar Jr, D. G., Heino, J., Mannion, P. D., Williamson, T.E., Wilson Mantilla, G.P. & Brusatte, S. L. (2022). Shifts in food webs and niche stability shaped survivorship and extinction at the end-Cretaceous. Science Advances, 8(49), DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add5040

Our PI Sara Varela has co-authored the new paper led by Mohammad Abdul Wahed Chowdhury. In the paper entitled: “Favourable climatic niche in low elevations outside the flood zone characterises the distribution pattern of venomous snakes in Bangladesh“, where authors used spatial ecology to gain knowledge on snake distribution in Bangladesh. His aim is to help people, using these maps to make better management plans to distribute antivenom doses across the country.

Our team member Sara Gamboa lead a paper to test Vrba eco-evo hypothesis using data from butterflies.

Discover more:

Gamboa, S., Condamine, F. L., Cantalapiedra, J. L., Varela, S., Pelegrín, J. S., Menéndez, I., Blanco, F., & Hernández Fernández, M. (2022). A phylogenetic study to assess the link between biome specialization and diversification in swallowtail butterflies. Global Change Biology, 00, 1– 13. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16344

Our PI Sara Varela participate in a research to analyze if the thermal niche is linked to range size variations due to climatic oscillations, with cold-adapted species currently suffering a more striking range reduction compared to temperate species. The results from this work support the persistence of Afro-Palearctic migrations during the LGM due to the presence of climatically suitable wintering areas in Africa even during glacial maxima.

More:

Carrera, L., Pavia, M. & Varela, S. Birds adapted to cold conditions show greater changes in range size related to past climatic oscillations than temperate birds. Sci Rep 12, 10813 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-14972-7

Discover all our papers!

We received the visit from the researcher Alex Milcu, who is the director of the CNRS Ecotron of Montpellier and a researcher at the CNRS, Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (France).

He is an ecosystem ecologist working on the consequences of biodiversity loss and climate change on the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems.

In this talk, he presented the capabilities of advanced controlled environment facilities for ecosystem research (Ecotrons). ECOTRONS are of great interest because they have the capacity to simultaneously control environmental conditions while allowing for ecosystem-level measurements of carbon and water fluxes.

We also received a visit from the researcher Mar Sobral, and we are sure that new ideas and projects will come out of these meetings.

Postdoctoral researcher Violete Chiara , a member of the GEA group (University of Vigo’s Animal Ecology Group), visited our lab. She gave us a talk on “How do social spiders achieve synchronization during collective hunting?” based on her latest paper: A variable refractory period increases collective performance in noisy environments. 

This week we visited the Estación de Ciencias Mariñas de Toralla (ECIMAT) facilities. The person who guided us on the visit was José González, Head of the Oceanography Unit.

We were also accompanied on this visit by postdoctoral researcher Pedro Beca Carretero who is working at the Instituto de Investigaciones Mariñas – CSIC in Vigo.

A new paper is out! Maraísa Resende Braga studied how birds from the family Tyrannidae might be impacted by the ongoing climate change.

Results suggest that tropical and temperate species would suffer from different stressors. Neotropical austral migrant species would lose part of their breeding ranges, while Nearctic-Neotropical species would need to fly long distances to reach the same climatic conditions of their current breeding ranges.

Resende Braga, M., Jorge, L.R., Jahn, A.E., Loyola, R. and Varela, S. 2022. Future climate change will impact the migration of New World migrant flycatchers (Tyrannidae). Ornithol. Res. 30, 63–74 10.1007/s43388-022-00081-6 

Illustration by @CireniaSketches

MAPAS ID: 947921 ERC research project supports #WatchOutStickyFloor #OJOSueloPegajoso campaign together with the Asociación Espalola de Ecología Terrestre (AEET) for the International Women’s Day.

Discover more about the campaign in our outreach section.

Art by @CireniaSketches

We are pleased to be part of the new paper published in Historical Biology, a work dedicated to the palaeontologist Jorge Morales.

A macroevolutionary study published in Historical Biology and led by professor Manuel Hernández Fernández (UCM, IGEO) from the PMMV team who invited us to participate entitled “Macroevolution and climate changes: a global multi-family test supports the resource-use hypothesis in terrestrial mammals”

The link for the paper is available in our Research section.

We had a guest visitor at our lab. Today Borja Jimenez Alfaro, from the Research Unit of Biodiversity (CSIC, Uni Oviedo, Asturias) talking about biodiversity up in the mountains.

We are delighted to welcome Lucas Buffanat at the MapasLab, a Master’s student from l’École Normale Supérieure de Lyon who start a short stay with us. #WelcomeToMapasLab!

The press reports the new study published by our member Lewis Jones entitled: “Uneven spatial sampling distorts reconstructions of Phanerozoic seawater temperature“: Press release

You can access the article here.

The new paper published by our team member Sofía Galván has been released today  https://www.ardeola.org/es/volumenes/691/articulos/97-114/

Check this post about the research published by our team member Alessandro Chiarenza published on Nature Portfolio Ecology and Evolution Community website.

You can also check the open-access paper in Scientific Reports here.

Our team member Alessandro Chiarenza participate in a seminar talking about dinosaur macroevolution and also got the chance to talk about our lab!

Our team member Sofía Galván has been teaching at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in the Master’s degree in Zoology, in the subject of Methods in Zoological Research with Professor Rafa Barrientos.

Our team member Lewis A. Jones participated in organizing the International Fossil Coral and Reef Society Early Career Researcher Symposium. The meeting will be online and take place on October 15th.

Our PI Sara Varela will run one of the workshops at CPEGBerlin

9th September – Workshop: Mapping past species distributions

https://www.cpegberlin.com/program.html

https://twitter.com/MapasLab/status/1410897299421777921

Sara Varela joins the conference “Unha carreira científica en desigualdade” organized by GCiencia and Deputación de Pontevedra.

https://www.facebook.com/CienciaG/videos/ciencia-en-feminino-unha-carreira-cient%C3%ADfica-en-desigualdade/275302700739309/

https://cim.uvigo.gal/en/2021/03/sara-varela-researcher-funded-by-the-european-research-council-will-join-the-cim/

https://www.gciencia.com/ciencia/sara-varela-estuda-a-evolucion-nos-ultimos-540-millons-de-anos/

https://www.uvigo.gal/universidade/comunicacion/duvi/sara-varela-incorporase-uvigo-cunha-nova-lina-investigacion-os-procesos-evolucion-extincion-ultimos

https://www.atlantico.net/articulo/vigo/biologa-investigadora-sara-varela-reincorpora-uvigo/20210310223453826779.html

Sara Varela and Mar Sobral present a virtual celebration of science, where 15 biologists  tell us about a female scientist who has influenced them in their career

https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/posts/international-women-s-day-2021