Hi, I am Leandro Duarte, and this is the Phylogenetic and Functional Ecology Lab (LEFF) website. LEFF was born on mid 2009, just a few months after I got a position as associate professor (professor adjunto) at UFRGS. At its very beginning, the lab was thought as a research venue where people would develop and apply methods to disentangle historical and functional components of plant diversity distribution. I always had a particular preference for plants as study system. Nonetheless, along the years the predominance of plants in LEFF’s projects has tended to decrease, to my despair. If the biological group defines the researcher, I am now a mammalogist (?!), but perhaps in the near future I might be recognized as a herpetologist, or perhaps again a plant ecologist. I used to define myself as a community ecologist, although I am not so sure about that anymore… So, let’s say I am simply an ecologist.
Important to say, at the time LEFF was established we were not concerned about the intricate aspects of phylogeny construction, micro and macroevolutionary processes or evolutionary models of trait evolution, as my theoretical background came from functional (community) ecology, which of course affected the way lab’s projects were initially tailored. This limitation pervaded the first projects developed at the lab, but at the same time freed us to focus (perhaps ingenuously to some extent) on the implications of phylogenetic gradients to community assembly patterns. Phylogenetic Fuzzy Weighting (Pillar & Duarte 2010) and Principal Coordinates of Phylogenetic Structure (Duarte 2011) represented theoretical and methodological cornerstones for the lab, since these frameworks defined the pattern description methodology based on which we built most of our ideas along the years. Although our research is not restricted to these methods, they remain revealing new features, so… to be continued!
LEFF is kept alive by the several undergraduate and graduate students that choose it as their second home during BSc, MSc or PhD courses, as well as the many collaborators we have the luck to interact with. Our students are the driving force of the lab, a permanent source of new ideas, perspectives, and coffee. Since the first days of LEFF, the topics addressed in our projects have been broadening in scope. If initially our main goal was to explain phylogenetic gradients across communities, nowadays we address a variety of questions relating micro and macroevolution, ecological traits, species community assembly, environmental gradients, biogeographic history and human impacts on biodiversity. Although LEFF is grounded on theory and method development, we also look at the real world, as theory on Nature without Nature seems to make no sense. Thus, any effort to apply the best theoretical knowledge and methodological advance to solve environmental problems is welcome, as you are welcome to know us!