Humans have been documenting biodiversity for over 250 years, yet an estimated 80% of land-based species remain undescribed. As we enter the sixth extinction, the need to document our biodiversity becomes even more urgent. Invertebrates are crucial members of ecosystems: their presence serves as an indication of the quality of the environment, the surrounding biodiversity and human well-being. There is global concern about the declining insect population, and the underlying drivers of these declines will not be addressed without documenting and understanding our invertebrate fauna. My research approach is driven by the power of molecular techniques in testing evolutionary processes at various levels: population, species and higher taxa. I am interested in finding common evolutionary patterns in different invertebrate taxa that reflect landscape changes and linking them to climatic, biogeographic and geological changes. My work has contributed significantly to the understanding of dung beetle and lacewing biosystematics. Using dung beetles and lacewings as model organisms I will show how I investigate patterns of speciation and how these are driven by geological and paleoclimatic factors. I will demonstrate how these methodologies have been expanded to include other invertebrate taxa, such as trapdoor and baboon spiders. My future research will continue to focus on organismal diversity, including keratin-feeding beetles, pollinating flies, and dung beetle gut microbiomes. My research on lacewings and dung beetles is ongoing. I am taking a fine scale approach to teasing apart biogeographic patterns of insects with overlapping distributions.

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