Per Lundberg

Research Interests and Projects

The evolutionary ecology of natural communities

The interplay between current ecological processes, such as species sorting and community assembly, and evolutionary contingencies is a key eco-evolutionary question. The regional pool of extant species, and the corresponding distribution of phenotypes in trait-space, is defined by the evolutionary history of the constituent species. This project attempts to find general rules for how biological diversity emerges from the combination of ecological filtering and historical contingencies. The theoretical work is complemented by two experimental studies - one on extremely speciose marine bacterial communities, and one on highly specialized bird communities in Neotropical low-land rainforests. The work on bacteriais done in collaboration with ecological microbiologists in Lund and Kalmar. The work on Peruvian birds is done in collaboration with the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA The project is affiliated with the research programs GENECO and BECC at Lund University

In addition to this main interest of mine, I am also engaged in population dynamics modeling, the evolution of partial migration, and in the study of memetics as revealed in the spread of ideas, attitudes, inventions and societal institutions (such as democracy). The latter work is done i collaboration with Mikael Sandberg, Halmstad University