Chapel Hill – On Friday, February 12th, at 12 pm, the North Carolina Botanical Garden (NCBG) will celebrate the 207th birthday of Charles Darwin with a presentation by Allen Hurlbert, entitled “The Evolution of Biodiversity: History or Science?” The event will take place in Reeves Auditorium with free admission, open to the public.
The tropics host a stunning diversity of plants and animals relative to the temperate zone, and this fact has puzzled biologists for more than two centuries. Is this so‐called “latitudinal gradient” a quirk of history, or is it based on some first order principles? The answer has implications for the consequences of global change, and for the search for life on other planets.
Hurlbert is an associate professor in the biology department at UNC‐Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the structure of ecological communities, and the processes that are responsible for determining their patterns of diversity, composition, turnover and relative abundance.