Island TIME-LINES to quantify biodiversity change

Global biodiversity, which includes all the world’s species and the countless varieties of genes that allow all life (animals and plants) to adapt and survive, is changing. The question is how fast and why. To answer these questions, the EU-funded TIME-LINES project will investigate whether biodiversity is spatially structured. Specifically, it will study a range of high-quality palaeoecological records (derived from sedimentary sequences) from islands worldwide. Islands are considered hotspots of biodiversity and natural laboratories. The project will research about 5 000 years of plant biodiversity change and the drivers of that change. The results will open new research horizons, bringing palaeoecology and biogeography together.