Erin Saupe is a palaeobiologist working to investigate interactions between life and environments over geological time scales. Research in the Saupe Lab addresses fundamental questions on the origin, maintenance, and conservation of biological diversity. More specifically, we integrate biological data with information from the fossil record to elucidate the controls on community and species’ responses to environmental change across various spatial and temporal scales. The Saupe Lab also focuses attention on the newly-emerging field of conservation palaeobiology, which applies deep-time information to current problems of species conservation. Our work in this field provides vital information for assessing how current and future climate change will impact the Earth’s biodiversity. In general, our research is question- rather than methods-driven, but we apply a diverse toolkit to investigating these lines of research, including quantitative techniques such as modelling, genetics, and environmental reconstructions.
Current areas of interest:
1) Conservation palaeobiology: using the past to preserve the present and future
2) Extinction selectivity: what makes species prone to extinction, and how does this vary through time?
3) Latitudinal diversity gradients: when and why do they form?
4) (Palaeo)biogeography: what factors control biological distribution, and how do Earth and environmental processes affect biological diversification?
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