- Temporal change of biodiversity. Biodiversity is under pressure from human actions. Intensive agriculture, deforestation, overexploitation, climate change, or biological invasions all change nature.
- Geographic distribution of biodiversity. Why are some places on Earth full of living things, while other places aren’t? Why are there fever than 100 species of trees that live in the millions of km2 of boreal forests in Eurasia and North america, while there can be hundreds of species cooccurring in as little as 50 ha in a tropical forest of South America or Asia?
- Statistics, machine learning, spatial and temporal scale. We develop new models for big and messy data of the 21st century.
- Ecological patterns. We seek general patterns rather than anecdotes or local context.
Modelling of Biodiversity Lab (MOBI Lab) is a research group led by Petr Keil at Department of Spatial Sciences at FZP CZU in Prague, Czech Republic.
Follow our news on https://petrkeil.github.io/
Our focus:
Projects
BEAST (ERC consolidator grant, 2023-2027)
Biodiversity dynamics across a continuum of space, time, and their scales
COCOS (Marie-Curie fellowship, 2022-2024)
effects of Climatic extremes On eCOsystem Stability (PI Manuele Bazzichetto)
GRACE (GAČR-FWF international grant, 2024-2026)
GRAssland Communities Experiment (GRACE) - 300 years of insight from a large-scale natural experiment
Publications
Petr Keil's key CZU publications (more at https://petrkeil.github.io/papers/)
- Leroy, Reif, Vermouzek, Stastny, Travnickova, Bejcek, Mikulas, Keil (2024) Decomposing biodiversity change to processes of extinction, colonization, and recurrence across scales. Ecography
- Grattarola, Bowler, Keil (2023) Integrating presence-only and presence–absence data to model changes in species geographic ranges: An example in the Neotropics. Journal of Biogeography
- Leroy, Reif, Storch, Keil (2023) How has bird biodiversity changed over time? A review across spatio-temporal scales. Basic and Applied Ecology
- Marselis, Keil, Chase, Dubayah (2022) The use of GEDI canopy structure for explaining variation in tree species richness in natural forests. Environmental Research Letters 17: 405003.
- Keil et al. (2021) Measurement and analysis of interspecific spatial associations as a facet of biodiversity. Ecological Monographs, 91: e01452.
Petr Keil's selected past publications
- Keil & Chase (2019) Global patterns and drivers of tree diversity integrated across a continuum of spatial grains. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 3: 390-399.
- Keil et al. (2018) Macroecological and macroevolutionary patterns emerge in the universe of GNU/Linux operating systems. Ecography, 41: 1788-1800.
- Keil et al. (2017) Spatial scaling of extinction rates: Theory and data reveal nonlinearity and a major upscaling and downscaling challenge. Global Ecology and Biogeography, 27: 2-13.
- Keil et al. (2015) On the decline of biodiversity due to area loss. Nature Communications, 6: 8837.
- Storch, Keil & Jetz (2012) Universal species-area and endemics-area relationships at continental scales. Nature, 488: 78-81.