Kristen Martinet

The main goal of Kristen Martinet's research is to develop tools that help scientists understand patterns of biodiversity. She is particularly fond of adaptive radiations, where species rapidly diversify because of newfound ecological opportunity. Her favorite adaptive radiations occurred on island systems (the radiations of the lizard genus Anolis in the Greater Antilles and the snail genus Naesiotus in the Galápagos Islands), so she gravitated toward island biogeography as a focal research interest.

Inspired by this love of island biogeography, she created an R package (called SSARP) to easily plot species-area relationships for a given island-dwelling taxon using a built-in island area database and species occurrence records from web databases. These species-area relationships help visualize patterns of species richness across islands around the globe. She is currently extending the functionality of this R package to include the ability to create speciation-area relationships to allow researchers to further understand evolutionary dynamics across island systems.