Barnabas Daru
Assistant Professor of Biology and Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment
Web page: https://darulab.org/
Bio
Barnabas Daru is an Assistant Professor of Biology. He is interested in the ecology and biogeography of plants across ecological scales. He studied botany in Johannesburg, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, where he worked on new uses of herbarium specimens for understanding plant ecology and evolution in the Anthropocene, the epoch of profound human impact on Earth. Current research in the Daru lab addresses the role of phylogeny in: 1) understanding how species are distributed, 2) conserving unique communities, and 3) understanding changing distributions in the Anthropocene.
Academic Appointments
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Assistant Professor, Biology
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Center Fellow (By courtesy), Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Honors & Awards
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TBA Field Course Kibale Uganda, Tropical Biology Association (2008)
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New Phytologist Poster Prize, New Phytologist Trust (2015)
Professional Education
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Postdoctoral, Harvard University, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology (2018)
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PhD, University of Johannesburg, Botany (2015)
2024-25 Courses
- Introduction to Ecology
BIO 81 (Aut) - Plant EcoEvo in the Field
BIO 137 (Spr) -
Independent Studies (3)
- Directed Reading in Biology
BIO 198 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Graduate Research
BIO 300 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum) - Undergraduate Research
BIO 199 (Aut, Win, Spr, Sum)
- Directed Reading in Biology
Stanford Advisees
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Doctoral Dissertation Reader (AC)
Desire Nalukwago, Andrea Nebhut -
Postdoctoral Faculty Sponsor
Collin Gross -
Doctoral Dissertation Advisor (AC)
Paul Markley
All Publications
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Mass production of unvouchered records fails to represent global biodiversity patterns.
Nature ecology & evolution
2023
Abstract
The ever-increasing human footprint even in very remote places on Earth has inspired efforts to document biodiversity vigorously in case organisms go extinct. However, the data commonly gathered come from either primary voucher specimens in a natural history collection or from direct field observations that are not traceable to tangible material in a museum or herbarium. Although both datasets are crucial for assessing how anthropogenic drivers affect biodiversity, they have widespread coverage gaps and biases that may render them inefficient in representing patterns of biodiversity. Using a large global dataset of around 1.9 billion occurrence records of terrestrial plants, butterflies, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals, we quantify coverage and biases of expected biodiversity patterns by voucher and observation records. We show that the mass production of observation records does not lead to higher coverage of expected biodiversity patterns but is disproportionately biased toward certain regions, clades, functional traits and time periods. Such coverage patterns are driven by the ease of accessibility to air and ground transportation, level of security and extent of human modification at each sampling site. Conversely, voucher records are vastly infrequent in occurrence data but in the few places where they are sampled, showed relative congruence with expected biodiversity patterns for all dimensions. The differences in coverage and bias by voucher and observation records have important implications on the utility of these records for research in ecology, evolution and conservation research.
View details for DOI 10.1038/s41559-023-02047-3
View details for PubMedID 37127769
View details for PubMedCentralID 5489731
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Mass production of unvouchered records fails to represent global biodiversity patterns
Nature Ecology & Evolution
2023
View details for DOI 10.1038/s41559-023-02047-3
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Woody plant phylogenetic diversity supports nature's contributions to people but is at risk from human population growth
Conservation Letters
2022; 15: e12914
View details for DOI 10.1111/conl.12914
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Widespread homogenization of plant communities in the Anthropocene
Nature Communications
2021; 12: 6983
View details for DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-27186-8
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Exploring a new way to think about climate regions
eLife
2021; 10: e67422
View details for DOI 10.7554/eLife.67422
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Impediments to understanding seagrasses’ response to global change
Frontiers in Marine Science
2021; 8: 608867
View details for DOI 10.3389/fmars.2021.608867
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Bias assessments to expand research harnessing biological collections
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
2021; 36: 1071-1082
View details for DOI 10.1016/j.tree.2021.08.003
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Migratory birds distribute seeds to new climates
Nature
2021; 595: 34-36
View details for DOI 10.1038/d41586-021-01547-1
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Endemism patterns are scale dependent.
Nature Communications
2020; 11: 2115
View details for DOI 10.1038/s41467-020-15921-6
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phyloregion: R package for biogeographic regionalization and macroecology
Methods in Ecology and Evolution
2020; 11: 1483-1491
View details for DOI 10.1111/2041-210X.13478
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Savanna tree evolutionary ages inform the reconstruction of the paleoenvironment of our hominin ancestors
Scientific Reports
2020; 10: 12430
View details for DOI 10.1038/s41598-020-69378-0
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Spatial overlaps between the global protected areas network and terrestrial hotspots of evolutionary diversity
Global Ecology and Biogeography
2019; 28: 757-766
View details for DOI 10.1111/geb.12888
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Temperature controls phenology in continuously flowering Protea species of subtropical Africa
Applications in Plant Sciences
2019; 7: e01232
View details for DOI 10.1002/aps3.1232
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Invasive species differ in key functional traits from native and non-invasive alien plant species
Journal of Vegetation Science
2019; 30: 994-1006
View details for DOI 10.1111/jvs.12772
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A novel proof of concept for capturing the diversity of endophytic fungi preserved in herbarium specimens
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
2018; 374: 20170395
View details for DOI 10.1098/rstb.2017.0395
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Widespread sampling biases in herbaria revealed from large-scale digitization
New Phytologist
2018; 217: 939-955
View details for DOI 10.1111/nph.14855
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Biological collections for understanding biodiversity in the Anthropocene
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
2018; 374: 20170386
View details for DOI 10.1098/rstb.2017.0386
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Unravelling the evolutionary origins of biogeographic assemblages
Diversity and Distributions
2018; 24
View details for DOI 10.1111/ddi.12679
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Understanding the processes underpinning patterns of phylogenetic regionalization
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
2017; 32: 845-860
View details for DOI 10.1016/j.tree.2017.08.013
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Climate change may reduce the spread of non-native species
Ecosphere
2017; 8: e01694
View details for DOI 10.1002/ecs2.1694
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Integrating biogeography, threat and evolutionary data to explore extinction crisis in the taxonomic group of cycads
Ecology and Evolution
2017; 7: 2735-2746
View details for DOI 10.1002/ece3.2660
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Testing the reliability of the standard and complementary DNA barcodes for the monocot subfamily Alooideae from South Africa
Genome
2017; 60: 337-347
View details for DOI 10.1139/gen-2015-0183
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Phylogenetic regionalization of marine plants reveals close evolutionary affinities among disjunct temperate assemblages
Biological Conservation
2017; 213: 351-356
View details for DOI 10.1016/j.biocon.2016.08.022
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Ten years of barcoding at the African Centre for DNA barcoding
Genome
2017; 60: 629-638
View details for DOI 10.1139/gen-2016-0198
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Spiny plants, mammal browsers and the origin of African savannas
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
2016; 113: E5572–E5579
View details for DOI 10.1073/pnas.1607493113
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A novel phylogenetic regionalization of the phytogeographic zones of southern Africa reveals their hidden evolutionary affinities
Journal of Biogeography
2016; 43: 155-166
View details for DOI 10.1111/jbi.12619
- Multiple routes underground? Frost alone cannot explain the evolution of underground trees New Phytologist 2016; 209: 910-912
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Opportunities for unlocking the potential of genomics for African trees
New Phytologist
2016; 210: 772–778
View details for DOI 10.1111/nph.13826
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A search for a single DNA barcode for seagrasses of the world
DNA Barcoding in Marine Perspectives: Assessment and Conservation of Biodiversity
edited by Trivedi, S., Ansari, A. A.
Springer International Publishing Switzerland. 2016: 313-330
View details for DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41840-7_19
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Marine protected areas are insufficient to conserve global marine plant diversity
Global Ecology and Biogeography
2016; 25: 324–334
View details for DOI 10.1111/geb.12412
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Phylogenetic exploration of commonly used medicinal plants in South Africa
Molecular Ecology Resources
2015; 15: 405-413
View details for DOI 10.1111/1755-0998.12310
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Spatial incongruence among hotspots and complementary areas of tree diversity in southern Africa
Diversity and Distributions
2015; 21: 769-780
View details for DOI 10.1111/ddi.12290
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DNA barcodes reveal microevolutionary signals in fire response trait in two legume genera
AoB PLANTS
2015; 7: plv124
View details for DOI 10.1093/aobpla/plv124