Museum director’s career spans from butterfly fields in Mexico to predicting global biodiversity patterns


“He is able to approach these questions with a vision which very few people on earth can bring. And, that is really exciting.”


Town Peterson
KU University Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

 

Jorge Soberón began his career as an insect ecologist in Mexico watching the hairstreak butterfly through binoculars. Eventually, he began to see the world as a butterfly would and could predict the habitat in which the territorial male would stake his claim.

Over the decades, Soberón’s field of research has grown from studying a few acres of butterfly terrain to encompassing broad regions of the world as he uses theoretical and computational modeling to predict biodiversity patterns on a global scale. This spring, Soberón, a native of Mexico and University Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was named interim director of KU’s Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum, stepping into a role that was held for 25 years by Leonard Krishtalka.

Soberón’s connection to KU dates back to the 1990s when he was appointed to head the National Commission on Biodiversity of Mexico (CONABIO), a federal agency created to track the country’s biodiversity. The fourth most ecologically diverse country in the world and home to mountain ranges, desert basins and coastline, Mexico sits at a crossroads where North America’s temperate climate intersects with South America’s tropics. The biodiversity of Mexico is particularly important to indigenous populations, who incorporate thousands of plants into their medicine, building materials, food and cultural ceremonies.

“There was this perception that biodiversity was being threatened by encroaching development, poaching and all sorts of things,” Soberón said. “And the government had this idea that you can’t manage or control what you don’t know.”

While the scale of the agency’s oversight was new to Soberón – moving his focus from a few acres to entire regions of the world – working with mathematical and computer models wasn’t. Among Soberón’s first tasks was creating an inventory of Mexico’s species, which connected him to many researchers, including Town Peterson, KU University Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Peterson was with a team already building a database of the country’s bird species. The collaboration with Peterson blossomed owing to a shared interest in biodiversity and the ecology of distributions of species.

In those days, Peterson recalls meeting in Soberón’s administrative office at CONABIO, where Soberón would open up a large set of research cabinets behind his desk, excited to share ideas. When the secretary came into the room to pull Soberón into his next appointment, the cabinets would close back up as he returned to his administrative work.

“You could see the light dim in his eyes because he was a researcher at heart. That was the fun part of his day,” Peterson said.

Part of Soberón’s efforts focused on building software that could process large datasets. He also collaborated with Peterson, Krishtalka and a small group of other close colleagues to convince museums and research institutions to share data.

“It sounds a little humdrum now, but 25 years ago that was a big psychological barrier for a lot of institutions,” Peterson said. “At the very beginning, it was literally a couple of friends who trusted each other and wanted to do this experiment. The first two databases linked in what are now thousands of databases were KU and a sister institution in Mexico.”

In those early days, Soberón did much of the heavy lifting, negotiating with institutions such as the Smithsonian to share data. Eventually, grant funding was used to incentivize data sharing, and objections slowly dissipated. Today, open data is a standard requirement for major grant funding institutions.

“It was this decades-long effort and Jorge played an absolutely key role in those arguments of trying to get institutions to abandon their hang-ups about sharing data,” Peterson said.

Under Soberón’s direction, CONABIO went from an organization with a meager budget focused on creating a database of species to one that received millions of dollars a year and was involved in tracking forest fires using remote sensing from satellites, predicting the impact of genetically modified organisms on Mexican crops, and assisting in international negotiations.

“Jorge was in a unique place because at CONABIO he had the science vision to put together the right information infrastructure for Mexico to be able to use that information powerfully,” Peterson said.  “Jorge did a masterful job at that and to this day, thanks to his work, Mexico would be considered amongst the top two or three nations in the world as far as biodiversity information infrastructure.”

In 2018, Soberón was awarded a Silver Medal by the Mexican government as one of 31 “Distinguished Mexicans” who are living outside of Mexico.

Searching for an opportunity to return to academia and finding support from Krishtalka and Peterson, Soberón arrived at KU in 2005.

He brought with him research questions that he had developed at CONABIO, but never had the opportunity to explore. He’s been working to answer them ever since.

“Jorge is able to do this fascinating bridging between theoretical ecology, global diversity science, conservation biology and other relevant fields,” Peterson said. “That means he is able to approach these questions with a vision which very few people on earth can bring. And, that is really exciting.”

The key question for Soberón is what determines how far a species will spread. So, for instance, why do Siberian tigers roam the mountains of the Russian Far East, but are not found in similar habitats in Canada?

“It represents a very deep question in biology: what are the factors that determine an area of distribution for one species? And, if you solve it for one species, maybe you can do it for hundreds or thousands of other species. Then you get the biodiversity pattern, which is the accumulation of many individual patterns,” Soberón said. 

The biodiversity informatics techniques that Soberón helped develop and promote are now used every day all over the world for addressing ecological challenges such as the management of invasive species, climate change and infectious diseases.

For example, when a moth that was known to eat and eradicate entire regions of cacti arrived in Florida, Soberón’s team developed the first models that showed the possible dispersal of the insect. Those models helped the American and Mexican governments plan how to contain the moth, preventing it from traveling to the American Southwest and Mexico, where the cacti are an important food source for people and livestock.

“Imagine the deserts of North America without cacti, it would be completely different. It would be a disaster,” Soberón said.

Predicting biodiversity patterns is important because healthy ecosystems provide fertile soil, clean water, oxygen in the air, carbon sinks, pollinators, medicinal plants and other life-sustaining functions.

“We shouldn’t be playing God with our planet, it’s the only planet we have. It is so arrogant and blind. We don’t know how it works, really. And, we are messing with it like crazy, like nothing matters. It matters, it is going to affect us in a major way,” Soberón said.

As the interim director of the Biodiversity Institute & Natural History Museum, Soberón is tasked with educating the state on the importance of biodiversity. Along with raising more funds to grow the museum, Soberón’s goal is to better reach Kansans. In particular, he wants to improve outreach with politicians and those living in the western part of the state about the institute’s work on regional issues, such as pollinators, water capturing, the spread of diseases and grasslands, as well as its important international role.

“We have to be proud of this institution because it is unique in the state and it is a very important one in the United States and it is on the map internationally,” Soberón said. “We should care about it."