Biodiversity and the Evolving Earth: New Data, New Methods, New Insights

This project aims to develop new computational tools to understand the evolution of life and landscapes on Earth. It explores how biodiversity is generated and its connection to topographical evolution, focusing on the question: To what extent does topography and its history influence terrestrial biodiversity?

Recent advancements make this research more feasible. First, extensive data from biological, paleontological, and geochemical studies provide insights into life and environmental processes, with records covering nearly all of the Phanerozoic Eon. Second, the space industry has mapped Earth's topography at a high resolution, and drone technology allows for even more detailed surveys. These tools enable us to reconstruct Earth's topography and climate, from riverbeds to continents, including ancient landscapes beneath rocky or icy surfaces. Lastly, significant progress in dating, interpreting, and modeling biotic and landscape evolution helps us better understand the interaction between life and the Earth's surface.

These developments have reshaped our understanding of how life and landscapes evolve in response to external forces. However, there is still no framework that combines processes at different spatial and temporal scales to explain Earth's history. This project will address this gap by using new observations, alongside mathematical and computational tools (e.g., spectral analysis), to investigate how physical, climatic, and geochemical processes together shape topographic and biological evolution on Earth.