Miguel B. Araújo authored over 130 publications in internationally refereed journals and books and his work has been cited >10,500 times (h factor=52). Several studies were published in journals such as Nature, Science, and PNAS.
He is a senior researcher of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), and visiting full professor at the Copenhagen University Centre for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, and the University of Évora where he holds the ‘Rui Nabeiro’ Chair in Biodiversity. Prof. Araújo is also a member of the International Laboratory on Global Change, a joint venture between the CSIC and the Pontificia Catholic University of Chile.
Prof. Araújo serves as Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Ecography and associate editor of the Journal of Biogeography, and is member of the scientific committee of DIVERSITAS’ bioDISCOVERY programme. He also contributed to the IV IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report (Peace Nobel Prize 2007) and is member of the CSIC Scientific Advisory Board to the Spanish Government on issues related to the IPBES (International Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services).
After reading for his PhD in Geography at the University College London and the Natural History Museum (with Paul Williams, Dick Vane Wright, and Chris Humphries), he undertook post doctoral research in the ‘Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionelle et Evolutive‘ at the CNRS in Montpellier (with Sandra Lavorel). He was then awarded a Marie Curie fellowship to undertake research at the University of Oxford (with Rob Whittaker), after which he spent a year at the University of Copenhagen as a visiting Associate Professor (with Carsten Rahbek). Currently, he continues to travel extensively, and remains an active collaborator of several research groups in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, France, South Africa, Switzerland, US, and UK (see figure below).
Figure – Collaboration network. The nodes are authors with whom Miguel Aráujo has published at least 4 scientific articles. The size of the nodes is proportional to the sum of citations of these articles and the thickness of the connections represents the number of papers published with each author. The distance to central node is inversely related with the number of articles published in co-authorship, i.e., the closer the nodes to centre the more intense the collaboration. Network built in October 2011 by Ramón Villasante.
Prof. Araújo has a wide range of interests in biogeography, conservation planning, global change biology, and macroecology. Earlier work included the development of reserve-selection techniques that minimise species extinctions within reserves. He demonstrated that proposed techniques can improve persistence of species, with regards to conventional approaches. More recently, niche models have been used to investigate impacts of climate change on species’ distributions. The goal is to better understand the sources of uncertainty in models and to propose approaches to reduce them. One of his studies provided the first test of the performance of models under climate change and demonstrated the value of ensemble forecasting. Currently, research focuses on the history of global climates during the Tertiary and the Quaternary and how these affected current patterns of species richness.
Prof. Araújo has been principal or co-principal researcher in more than 15 research projects, including five large European funded consortiums on climate change mitigation and adaptation, and one FBBVA-funded international project involving Mexican and Brazilian partners to investigate climate change impacts on the biodiversity of Latin America. He was awarded €500,000 under the Rui Nabeiro Biodiversity Chair to promote higher education and high-level research in biodiversity and global change. He also provides consultancy to the Spanish and Portuguese Environmental Ministries on issues related to climate change impacts on Iberian biodiversity, and to the Council of Europe on climate change and European protected areas. Overall he contributed to raise more than EUR 22.000.000 for research projects. His work is regularly featured in the scientific and popular press, with several studies receiving high international coverage.
Selected publications
• Araújo, M.B. & Peterson, A.T. 2012. Uses and misuses of bioclimatic envelope modelling. Ecology. In press
• Araújo, M.B., Alagador, D., Cabeza, M., Lafourcade, B., Nogués Bravo, D. & Thuiller, W. 2011. Climate change threatens European conservation areas. Ecology Letters. 14: 484-492.
• Hof, C., Araújo, M.B., Jetz, W. & Rahbek, C. 2011. Climate change, pathogens and land use change additively threat amphibian diversity. Nature. 480: 516-519.
• Peterson, A.T.P., Soberón, J., Pearson, R.G., Anderson, R.P., Martínez-Meyer, E., Nakamura, M. & Araújo, M.B. 2011. Ecological Niches and Geographical Distributions: A Modeling Perspective. Monographs in Population Biology. Princeton University Press. Princeton.
• Thuiller, W., Lavergne, S., Roquet, C., Boulangeat, I., Lafourcade, B. & Araújo, M.B. 2011. Consequences of climate change on the Tree of Life in Europe. Nature. 470: 531-534.
• Pereira, H.M., Leadley, P.W., Proença, V., Alkemade, R., Scharlemann, J.W., Fernandez-Manjarrés, J.F., Araújo, M.B., Balvanera, P., Biggs, R., Cheung, W.W.L., Cooper, H.D., Gilman, E.L., Guénette, S., Hurtt, G.C., Huntington, H.P., Mace, G.M., Oberdoff, T., Revenga, C., Rodrigues, P., Scholes, R.J., Sumaila, U.R. & Walpole, M. 2010. Scenarios for global biodiversity in the 21st century. Science. 330: 1496-1501.
• Araújo, M.B., Thuiller, W. & Yoccoz, N.G. Re-opening the climate envelope reveals macroscale associations with climate in European birds. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 106 (16): E45-E46.
• Nogués-Bravo, D., Araújo, M.B., Romdal, T., and Rahbek, C. 2008. Scale effects and human impact on the elevational species richness gradients. Nature. 453:216-220.
• Nogués-Bravo, D., Rodríguez, J., Hortal, J., Batra, P. & Araújo, M.B. 2008. Climate change, humans, and the extinction of the mammoth. PLoS Biology. 6: e79. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060079.
• Araújo, M.B. & New, M. 2007. Ensemble forecasting of species distributions. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 22: 42-47.
• Araújo, M.B. & Rahbek, C. 2006. How does climate change affect biodiversity? Science. 313: 1396-1397.
• Schröter, D., Cramer, W., Leemans, R., Prentice, I.C., Araújo, M.B., Arnell, N.W., Bondeau, B., Bugmann, H., Carter, T., de la Vega-Leinert, A.C., Erhard, M., Ewert, F., Glendining, M., House, J., Kankaanpää, S., Klein, R.J.T., Metzger, M.J., Meyer, J., Mitchell, T., Lavorel, S., Lindner, M., Reginster, I., Rounsevell, M., Sabaté, S., Sánchez, A., Sitch, S., Smith, B., Smith, J., Smith, P., Sykes, M.T., Thonicke, K., Thuiller, W., Tuck, G., Zaehle, S. & Zierl, B. 2005. Ecosystem service supply and human vulnerability to global change in Europe. Science. 310: 1333-1337.
• Thuiller, W., Lavorel, S., Araújo, M.B., Sykes, M. & Prentice, I.C. 2005. Climate change threats to plant diversity in Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 102: 8245-8250.
• Ladle, R.J., Jepson, P., Araújo, M.B. & Whittaker, R.J. 2004. Dangers of crying wolf over risk of extinctions. Nature. 428: 799.
• Thuiller, W., Araújo, M.B., Pearson, R.G., Whittaker, R.J., Brotons, L. & Lavorel, S. 2004. Uncertainty in predictions of extinction risk. Nature. 430: doi10.1038/nature02716.
