Conference on Tectonic and Geomorphic Connections to Biodiversity

Highlight

We are organising a multiday, international workshop on the topic of “Tectonic and Geomorphic Connections to Biodiversity” in September 2026. The workshop will bring together approximately 100 scientists from diverse fields and from around the world to present recent advances, new methods and new theories and hypotheses regarding the connections between tectonics, landscape evolution, surface processes and the temporal and spatial development of biodiversity. We expect to engage with a variety of topics including:

• Relationships between climate, topography, geodiversity and biodiversity
• The role of tectonic processes in creating topographic complexity and transience
• Geomorphic processes, landscape evolution, habitat creation, isolation, speciation and endemism
• Geogenomic methods for establishing past and present biogeographical relationships
• Barriers, gateways and connections – connecting paleo-geographic events with biological isolation and dispersal
• Geologic-based resources and limitations on biodiversity
• High-resolution mapping of species distributions and their relationship to geology and geomorphology

Motivation

The importance of physical geography to the evolution and diversification of life has been recognised since Alexander von Humboldt explored the Andes and documented the relationships between species distributions, topography and climate. Modern studies of biodiversity and of biological evolution through geologic time have reinforced many of these concepts. The coupling between tectonics, landscape evolution and biodiversity is becoming widely recognised, and many recent studies have demonstrated significant correlations between various metrics of tectonic and geomorphic activity and plant and animal richness distributions.

Accelerated episodes of species diversification have been documented in many mountain ranges of the world, including the Andes, Hengduan Mountains, New Zealand, and the New Guinea highlands. The most common expression of tectonic impact on biodiversity is observed through mountain uplift, where the deformation of the Earth’s surface by tectonic or volcanic processes creates new habitats or isolates and fragments pre-existing regions and habitat. Although there is some correlation between the biodiversity of mountains and the relief of the landscape, the association between mountains and biodiversity is not uniform. Some regions that are less tectonically active, such as the Appalachian Mountains, Madagascar and the Amazon River Basin, also have exceptionally high numbers of species, suggesting more complex connections between the tectonic processes responsible for creating relief, erosional processes that reduce relief, and diversity patterns.

There is currently considerable interest in the geology and biology communities for investigating further these relationships and processes. Tectonics and geomorphology are disciplines concerned with the creation of physical geography and establishing paleogeography. In the biology and ecology communities, research has long recognising the importance of the paleogeography to diversification.

However, as with all research at disciplinary boundaries, there are many gaps in communication between disciplines. Biologists, ecologists, geologists and geomorphologists do not have easy means and opportunities to communicate the importance of their research outside their community. Researchers in one field struggle to find information in neighboring fields where they do not know the practitioners or journals. As a result, the scientific community’s understanding of the mechanisms that couple landscape evolution to biological evolution is still taking shape.

Bottom line

We would like to address this gap by holding a multiday, international workshop on the topic of: “Tectonic and Geomorphic Connections to Biodiversity”. The goal of the conference is to educate ourselves regarding our neighboring fields, kick-start new collaborations, and set a framework for new publications illustrating the opportunities provided by collaboration.