Emmy Noether Junior Research Group

Macroevolution of Birds and Mammals

We investigate a broad range of topics, bringing together large-scale biogeographical patterns and macroevolutionary processes. We work on biodiversity dynamics in time (geological time scales) and space (usually regional or global scale) of terrestrial vertebrates, in particular mammals and birds.

Please see here for more details on our four main themes:

1) Macroevolution of ecological niches, seasonal migration, and diversification in passerine birds
2) Diversity in time and space: integrating across fossil and living mammalian species
3) Global macroevolution, macroecology, and biogeography – the big picture
4) Past, current, and future human impacts on biodiversity

The group has existed since 2014 and works closely with other groups at Senckenberg BiK-F, in particular the working groups of Katrin Böhning-Gaese, Thomas Mueller and Matthias Schleuning.

We are entirely funded through different third-party grants:

Since 2018 Leibniz Competition grant to Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, Leibniz professorship for Susanne Fritz (P52/2017): “Geobiodiversity: assessing the impacts of mountain building and climate change on evolution and ecology of mammals and birds“

Since 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Foundation postdoctoral fellowship to Shan Huang: “Biodiversity-environment association in space and time: How Cenozoic climate influenced large mammals in the Northern Hemisphere”

Since 2014 Emmy Noether grant to Susanne Fritz from the DFG (German Research Foundation / Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft FR 3246/2): “Macroevolution of climatic niches in birds”

Team

SGN

Dr. Susanne Fritz

Head of Emmy Noether Research Group 'Macroevolution of birds and mammals'

Phone +49 69 754218-03

susanne.fritz@senckenberg.de

Research interests

I am interested in the processes underlying large-scale biogeographic and phylogenetic patterns and their relationships with the abiotic environment in time and space. I have worked on ecology, evolution and conservation of mammals, amphibians and birds, and am now focusing on macroevolution and biogeography of living and fossil birds and mammals.

For more details on my research, please see the description on my working group’s page here

Profiles
Google Scholar Profile
OrcID
Researcher ID and Publons

Full list of publications
Short CV

Editorial Board member at Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Subject Editor at Ecography
Associate Editor at Frontiers of Biogeography

Press Releases of the last five years

25/01/2018 – Mammals move less in human-modified landscapes (English), (German)
27/02/2017 – New insights into the mechanisms of how ungulates got bigger in the Neogene (English), (German)
15/09/2016 – For 20 million years, the diversity of large terrestrial mammals depended on plant growth (English) (German)
29/04/2014 – Gehen oder bleiben? – Neue Emmy Noether-Gruppe erforscht die Klima-Anpassung von Vögeln (in German only)
30/09/2013 – Wanted dead and alive – New concept for a better understanding of biodiversity in time and space (English) (German)

Teaching at Goethe University Frankfurt

BSc Biology: “Spezialisierung 2 – Ökologie der Tiere”
MSc Ecology and Evolution: module “Community ecology, macroecology and conservation”

SGN

Dr. Shan Huang

PostDoc

Phone +49 69 754218-45

shan.huang@senckenberg.de

Research interests

Biodiversity — Macroecology & Macroevolution

I am interested in understanding broad-scale biodiversity dynamics, in space and time. My research approach is synthesizing large ecological and evolutionary data sets to investigate processes that give rise to the dramatic temporal and spatial variation in different aspects of biodiversity, with an emphasis on deciphering the role of history in shaping the modern biota, including evolutionary history of the biotic components and historical environmental transitions.

I have found that different systems have advantages for answering different questions about biodiversity, so I integrate knowledge from studying various organismal systems, including terrestrial mammals, marine bivalves, and parasites. Here at BiK-F, I combine cross-continent paleontological and neontological data of living and extinct terrestrial large mammals to investigate the various effects of climatic conditions on how biodiversity has been generated and maintained, and how overall biodiversity has been ‘partitioned’ and ‘assembled’ into regional faunas.

Google Scholar Profile

Research website

Selected Publications

Huang, S., Eronen, J.T., Janis, C.M., Saarinen, J J., Silvestro, D. and Fritz, S.A. (2017) Mammal body size evolution in North America and Europe over 20 million years: Similar trends generated by different processes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Jablonski D., Huang S., Roy K., Valentine J.W. (2017) Shaping the latitudinal diversity gradient: New perspectives from a synthesis of paleobiology and biogeography. The American Naturalist.

Stephens, P. R., Altizer, S., Smith, K. F., Aguirre, A. A., Brown, J. H., Budischak, S. A., Byers, J. E., Dallas, T. A., Davies, T. J., Drake, J. M., Ezenwa, V. O., Farrell, M. J., Gittleman, J. L., Han, B. A., Huang, S., Hutchinson, R. A., Johnson, P., Nunn, C. L., Onstad, D., Park, A., Vazquez-Prokopec, G. M., Schmidt, J. P., Poulin, R. (2016) The macroecology of infectious diseases: A new perspective on global-scale drivers of pathogen distributions and impacts. Ecology Letters.

Tomasovych, A., Kennedy, J.,Betzner, T., Bitler Kuehnle, N., Edie, S., Kim, S., Supra, K., White, A., Rahbek, C., Huang, S., Price, T. and Jablonski, D. (2016) Unifying latitudinal gradients in range size and richness across marine and terrestrial systems. Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Huang, S., Roy, K. Valentine, J. W. and Jablonski, D. (2015) Convergence, divergence, and parallelism in marine biodiversity trends: Integrating present-day and fossil data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

Huang, S., Drake, J. M., Gittleman, J. L. and Altizer, S. (2015) Parasite diversity declines with host evolutionary distinctiveness: a global scale analysis of carnivores. Evolution.

Huang, S., Roy, K. and Jablonski, D. (2015) Origins, bottlenecks, and present-day diversity: Patterns of morphospace occupation in marine bivalves. Evolution.

Selected publications

Eyres, A., Böhning-Gaese, K. & S. A. Fritz (2017): Quantification of climatic niches in birds: adding the temporal dimension. Journal of Avian Biology 48: 1517-1531, doi: 1111/jav.01308

Huang, S., Eronen, J. T., Janis, C. M., Saarinen, J. J., Silvestro, D. & S. A. Fritz (2017). Mammal body size evolution in North America and Europe over 20 Myr: similar trends generated by different processes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284: 20162361, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2016.2361

Pearse, W. D., Barbosa, A. M., Fritz, S. A., Keith, S. A., Harmon, L. J., Harte, J., Silvestro, D., Xiao, X. & T. J. Davies (2018). Building up biogeography: pattern to process. Journal of Biogeography 45: 1223-1230, doi: 10.1111/jbi.13242