Aims

BIODESERTS is a research group hosted by CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos da Universidade do Porto, Portugal. The group comprises 40 researchers, including senior researchers, post-doctoral researchers, PhD, MSc and internship students, research technicians, and collaborators.

BIODESERTS is focused on assessing biodiversity patterns and evolutionary processes in deserts and arid regions. The group is committed at advancing scientific knowledge on these environments, producing guidelines of high scientific standard for conservation policies, training human resources in desert evolution and conservation biology, and communicating scientific activities to improve public appreciation of desert biodiversity.

BIODESERTS combines cutting-edge spatial and molecular analyses to derive integrative models of biodiversity distribution and evolution, and conservation priorities. Research is organised in three complementary lines:

1) Biodiversity distribution: production of atlases of species distribution, ecological modelling of biodiversity distribution, and identification of cryptic diversity;

2) Evolutionary and landscape processes: determination of evolutionary relationships, identification of conservation units, and understanding of the roles of paleoecological mechanisms in diversification events and of landscape features in current gene flow dynamics;

3) Systematic conservation planning: identification of threatened taxa and design of optimised reserve solutions for biodiversity conservation in face of climate change.

This website aims to disseminate the general achievements of BIODESERTS group.