New Subject Editor Christine N Meynard

21 October 2014

Dr Meynard is an ecologist with interests in species distributions, metacommunities and diversity at intermediate to large scales, as well as in the use of virtual ecology in macroecological studies. She received her PhD in Ecology from the University of California at Davis in 2006. She then went back to Chile, her native country, for a short postdoc on forest ecosystem services, and then moved to France for another postdoc where she studied multiple facets of diversity in Mediterranean fishes, Alpine plants and French birds, among other topics. After her postdoc she started a position at the French agronomical research institute where she focused on potential range shifts of agricultural pests due to climate change. She is now faculty at the Virginia Institute of Marine science, where she continues her work on species distributions and diversity with an emphasis on marine systems.

Dr Meynard’s research focuses on how we can use current patterns of diversity to understand (and predict) why species are where they are. Some of the tools that she has used in this quest include empirical analyses of communities’ spatial structure, such as community compositional similarity in space, as well as multiple facets of diversity (i.e. taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic community structure), species distribution modeling and patterns of species co-occurrence. She has also been interested in the use of simulations to link theory and practice, using virtual species to test different species distribution modeling strategies and using virtual communities to test different empirical analyses that relate patterns to current metacommunity theory.

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