Welcome to the lab pages of Brian McGill.
I seek to understand the patterns and processes controlling the distribution and abundance of organisms at medium to large scales to lead to more predictive theories of how distribution and abundance will change under anthropogenic global change (especially climate change and landcover change).

I tend to be a generalist in my research, pursuing a wide variety of questions, and I also tend to enjoy collaborations that take me into new areas. To keep some focus, when I evaluate taking on new research I check whether it has most or all of the following ingredients:


Some key research questions include:

  1. What determines species ranges? How will they change under climate change? How can we assess and improve existing models in this area?
  2. What controls the proportion of rare species in a community? How does this change with human disturbance?
  3. Can we develop a unified theory of biodiversity that explains classic patterns such as species abundance distributions, species are relationships, etc?
  4. Many others driven by students and collaborators but broadly consistent with the four touchstone features listed above.

background image under creative commons license by Ivy Main on wikimedia