Boris LEROY

My research works consist in studying biodiversity patterns at large spatial scales, from species to communities. Specifically, I study biodiversity response to environmental changes (anthropic pressures, climate change, biological invasions). From my works I try to produce indicators useful for biodiversity conservation: indicators of state, response, and trajectories.

My objective is to study the multiple facets of communities (taxonomic diversity, trait / functional diversity, phylogenetic diversity, etc.) at large spatial scales, to better understand the multiple impacts of environmental changes on biodiversity and its multiple components.

I am also working on species response to global change, using species distribution models (SDMs). Currently I am trying to better understand the uncertainties of SDMs, and their real ability to correctly predict species distributions, particularly in a global change context. To this aim I developed an R package called ‘virtualspecies’. Virtualspecies provides a framework to simulate virtual species distributions, to test the capacity of SDMs to correctly predict species distributions, under different constraints/biases.