Research focus

I am interested in large-scale evolutionary and ecological patterns of diversity, their relationships with the environment in time and space, and the processes underlying these patterns and relationships. I have worked on ecology, evolution and conservation, mainly in terrestrial vertebrates. Since I established my own research group in 2014 with an Emmy Noether fellowship of the German Research Foundation DFG, our research focused on macroevolution, macroecology, and biogeography of living and fossil birds and mammals. During a Leibniz professorship for Geobiodiversity Research that I held in 2021-2024 at Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre and Goethe University Frankfurt, my group increasingly developed interdisciplinary research in cooperation with experts in the reconstruction of paleoclimate and Earth surface dynamics, with the goal of understanding the effects of climate change and mountain building on biodiversity dynamics. Now since 2024 at iDiv and University of Jena, the focus of my research group Biodiversity in the Anthropocene has expanded to investigate how abiotic, biotic, and anthropogenic drivers shape biodiversity patterns in the past, present, and future.

More about my research is here; more about teaching here. Scroll down past the publications for a short CV.

My personal favourite 10 publications before iDiv

Eyres, A., J. T. Eronen, O. Hagen, K. Böhning-Gaese & S. A. Fritz (2021) Climatic effects on niche evolution in a passerine bird clade depend on paleoclimate reconstruction method. Evolution 75: 1046-1060. doi: 10.1111/evo.14209

Fritz, S. A., O. R. P. Bininda-Emonds & A. Purvis (2009) Geographical variation in predictors of mammalian extinction risk: big is bad, but only in the tropics. Ecology Letters 12: 538-549. doi: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2009.01307.x

Fritz, S. A. & A. Purvis (2010) Phylogenetic diversity does not capture body size variation at risk in the world’s mammals. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 277: 2435-2441. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0030

Fritz^‡, S. A., J. Schnitzler^‡, J. T. Eronen^‡, C. Hof^‡, K. Böhning-Gaese^‡ & C. H. Graham^‡ (2013) Diversity in time and space: wanted dead and alive. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 28: 509-516. doi: 10.1016/j.tree.2013.05.004

Fritz, S. A.,  J. T. Eronen, J. Schnitzler, C. Hof, C. M. Janis, A. Mulch, K. Böhning-Gaese & C. H. Graham (2016). Twenty-million-year relationship between mammalian diversity and primary productivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113: 10908-10913. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1602145113

Holt^‡, B. G., J.-P. Lessard^‡, M. K. Borregaard, S. A. Fritz, M. B. Araújo, D. Dimitrov, P.-H. Fabre, C. H. Graham, G. R. Graves, K. A. Jønsson, D. Nogués-Bravo, Z. Wang, R. J. Whittaker, J. Fjeldså & C. Rahbek (2013) An update of Wallace’s zoogeographic regions of the world. Science 339: 74-78. doi: 10.1126/science.1228282

Huang‡, S., M. J. M. Meijers‡, A. Eyres, A. Mulch & S. A. Fritz (2019) Unravelling the history of biodiversity in mountain ranges through integrating geology and biogeography. Journal of Biogeography 46: 1777-1791. doi: 10.1111/jbi.13622

Phillips, A. G., T. Töpfer, K. Böhning-Gaese & S. A. Fritz (2018) Evidence for distinct evolutionary optima in the morphology of migratory and resident birds. Journal of Avian Biology 49: e01807. doi: 10.1111/jav.01807

Tobias, J.A., C. Sheard, A. L. Pigot, A. J. M. Devenish, J. Yang, F. Sayol, … [103 authors], K. Böhning-Gaese, C. Rahbek, S. A. Fritz, G. H. Thomas & M. Schleuning (2022) AVONET: morphological, ecological and geographical data for all birds. Ecology Letters 25: 581–597. doi: 10.1111/ele.13898

Voskamp, A., C. Hof, M. F. Biber, K. Böhning-Gaese, T. Hickler, A. Niamir, S. G. Willis & S. A. Fritz (2022) Projected climate change impacts on the phylogenetic diversity of the world’s terrestrial birds: more than species numbers. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 289: 20212184. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2021.2184

‡ equal contributions.

For a full publication list, please refer to ResearcherID M-9872-2014 or OrcID 0000-0002-4085-636X.

CV

Since 2024      Professor for Biodiversity in the Anthropocene at German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig and Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany

2021-2024      Professor for Geobiodiversity Resarch at Goethe University Frankfurt in cooperation with Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK-F), Frankfurt, Germany (Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung – Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research); Leibniz professorship funded by the Competition 2018 of the Leibniz Association

2014-2021      Emmy Noether research group leader, Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK-F) & Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany; funded by the German Research Foundation DFG

2011-2014      Postdoctoral researcher, Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (BiK-F) & Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, Frankfurt, Germany

2009-2011      Postdoctoral researcher, Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

2009                PhD degree, Imperial College London, UK. Thesis „Comparative analyses of extinction risk in vertebrates”

2006-2009     Marie Curie Early-Stage Researcher at Imperial College London. EU FP6 project „HOTSPOTS – Understanding and conserving the Earth’s biodiversity hotspots”

2005                Diplom in Biology, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany

Current honorary positions

Subject Editor at Ecography, since 2014

Associate Editor at Frontiers of Biogeography, since 2013

Elected speaker of the Specialist Group for Macroecology in the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Gesellschaft für Ökologie, GfÖ), since 2023