Welcome to the Tobias lab at Imperial College London. We study how species evolve, interact, and regulate ecosystem function, focusing primarily on the world’s birds as a model system, including their role in seed dispersal and insect pest control. Our mission is to find solutions for major challenges facing humanity, including biodiversity conservation, affordable habitat restoration and sustainable food systems.
-
Populations
We study a wide array of factors influencing variation in populations of organisms, with a focus on speciation and trait diversification.
-
Interactions
A key goal of our research is to understand how interactions among species drive evolution and determine the structure and functioning of ecological communities.
-
Ecosystems
We apply insights from biodiversity science to understand and predict the responses of ecosystems to environmental change and to help develop strategies for conservation and sustainable development.
Latest news
-
March 2025 – Congratulations to Jingyi Yang for publishing her first PhD paper in Current Biology – a team effort with Chenyue Yang and Hung-wei Lin who also tackled this question in their Masters research projects at Silwood Park. Using global-scale phylogenetic models, we show that birds living at higher elevation have longer and larger wings, presumably an adaptation for increased flight efficiency to compensate for reduced air pressure and lower oxygen supply. Read Paper
-
March 2025 – A collaborative study with the Bird 10,000 Genome (B10K) consortium, this time led by David Duchene, combines traits and genomes to assess the drivers of variation in evolutionary rates across almost all bird families. The results, published in Nature, indicate that evolutionary rates are best predicted by clutch size and generation length, along with morphological traits associated with ecological niches, with a consistent burst in rates immediately after the Cretaceous–Palaeogene transition. Read paper
-
March 2025 – Our latest work on the structure and dynamics of morphological diversity in birds is finally published in Current Biology. Ferran Sayol led this work, showing that the placement of species within multidimensional trait space follows relatively simple rules determined by ecophysical trade-offs among specialised behaviours or functions. Read Paper
-
January 2025 – The first ecosystem-wide assessment of tropical rainforest degradation is published in Science, focusing on changes in environmental conditions, biodiversity, species traits and ecosystem functions. The results highlight the importance of logged forests for biodiversity and associated functions, based on.decades of field research in Sabah, Borneo, by a diverse array of collaborators. Read paper | Read press release
-
November 2024 – Rob Barber’s first paper from his PhD was published in PLoS Biology, showing that variation in sexual selection among the world’s birds is best explained by temperature seasonality and associated factors such as diet and migration. This study publishes a companion dataset to AVONET containing open-access sexual selection scores and uncertainty for 10,000+ bird species worldwide – hopefully an important resource for future researchers. Read paper
-
October 2024 – As a result of a longstanding collaboration with Tom Matthews (Birmingham University) and several other co-authors, our analysis of the scale of anthropogenic bird extinctions and their likely impact on the functioning of ecosystems was published in Science. The findings showed that humans have contributed to the loss of three billion years of evolutionary history and 7% of global functional diversity in birds alone. Read paper | Read perspective
-
July 2024 – In a collaborative study led by Lucas Martins and Jason Tylianakis (University of Canterbury, New Zealand), we used AVONET trait data to show that frugivorous birds have narrower and more optimized niches towards the edge of their geographical ranges. This result, published in Science, has implications for understanding the role of birds in seed dispersal, and the use of traits as metrics of trophic interactions. Read paper | Read overview
-
May 2024 – New family-level bird tree tree published in Nature! Along with the rest of the B10K team, we published the results of phylogenomic analyses, based on genomes sequenced from museum specimens of almost all bird families. These analyses help to clarify the early history of the avian radiation – apart from the enigmatic Hoatzin – and align more closely with trait evolution than previous trees. Read paper
-
May 2023 – Tom Weeks published his first PhD thesis chapter in Nature Ecology & Evolution: a global analysis combining field survey data from forest fragments and morphological measurements from the AVONET database showing that dispersal ability shaped by climatic seasonality is a key factor determining bird species responses to habitat change, outweighing effects of latitude, historical disturbance and diet. Read paper | Read overview