The MAPAS project has produced a coherent and high-impact body of work demonstrating that deep-time climatic and physiological constraints can be reconstructed and used to predict large-scale biogeographic responses to climate change. This is exemplified by the papers “100 million years of turtle paleoniche dynamics enable the prediction of latitudinal range shifts in a warming world” (Current Biology) and “Early Jurassic origin of avian endothermy and thermophysiological diversity in dinosaurs” (Current Biology), as well as “Climate drivers and palaeobiogeography of lagerpetids and early pterosaurs” (Nature Ecology & Evolution), which together show how paleoclimate and physiology jointly constrain distributions across hundreds of millions of years. In parallel, the project has demonstrated that long-term historical climate fragmentation, rather than present-day climate alone, explains mammal biogeography and diversity patterns, as shown in “Vrba was right: Historical climate fragmentation, and not current climate, explains mammal biogeography” (Global Change Biology), “Classic hypotheses of area, time, and climatic stability fall short in explaining high tropical species richness” (Journal of Biogeography), and “Future palaeontologists will detect current mammal latitudinal biodiversity gradient” (Global Ecology and Biogeography).
A second major line of results concerns the limits and biases of the fossil and historical record, and their consequences for macroevolutionary inference. The paper “Silent past: Biogeographic gaps in the Cenozoic fossil archive” (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology) quantifies, for the first time, how entire regions and biomes are systematically missing from the fossil record, while “The structure of the end-Cretaceous dinosaur fossil record in North America” (Current Biology) and “Mind the uncertainty: Global plate model choice impacts deep-time palaeobiological studies” (Methods in Ecology and Evolution) show that both sampling biases and paleogeographic uncertainty fundamentally affect deep-time biodiversity reconstructions. Complementarily, the project delivered key community resources such as palaeoverse (Methods in Ecology and Evolution), Wallace 2 (Ecography), which now provide essential infrastructure for reproducible macroecological and paleobiological research.
A third major achievement of MAPAS is the explicit integration of ecology, evolution, and Earth system processes. This includes demonstrating that physiological and ecological innovations have immediate demographic and macroevolutionary consequences, as shown in “C₄ photosynthesis provided an immediate demographic advantage to populations of the grass Alloteropsis semialata” (New Phytologist) and “The division of food space among mammalian species on biomes” (Ecography). Finally, diversification dynamics across major clades and systems were addressed in works such as “Do marine mammals diversify more slowly than non-marine mammals?” (Journal of Biogeography) and multiple studies linking climate change, biodiversity, and early human dispersals (e.g. Ecography, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology). Together, these results show that MAPAS has delivered a genuinely integrative, process-based understanding of how global biodiversity patterns emerge, are recorded, and are reshaped through deep time and into the present.
