Felipe Zapata

About

We study the origin, maintenance, and resilience of biodiversity in an ever-changing world. Our projects take place in the Tropics and California.

Research topics

• Geography
• Political Science
• Biology
• Computer Science
• Data science
• Evolutionary biology
• Ecology
• Medicine
• Engineering
• Engineering ethics

Selected publications

• Plant science decadal vision 2020–2030: Reimagining the potential of plants for a healthy and sustainable future

  Plant Direct · 2020 · 64 citations

  Plants, and the biological systems around them, are key to the future health of the planet and its inhabitants. The Plant Science Decadal Vision 2020-2030 frames our ability to perform vital and far-reaching research in plant systems sciences, essential to how we value participants and apply emerging technologies. We outline a comprehensive vision for addressing some of our most pressing global problems through discovery, practical applications, and education. The Decadal Vision was developed by…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The genomic revolution and species delimitation in birds (and other organisms): Why phenotypes should not be overlooked

  Ornithology · 2021 · 41 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Abstract Given the availability of genomic data to identify separately evolving groups of organisms, many researchers establish species limits based on assessments of the extent of gene flow among populations and often use analytical approaches to identify species in which gene flow is explicitly disallowed. Strictly considering lack of—or limited—gene flow as the main or only criterion to delimit species involves two main complications in practice. First, approaches often used to analyze genome…

  DOI

• Natural selection maintains species despite frequent hybridization in the desert shrub <i>Encelia</i>

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 36 citations

  Significance In Baja California, the deserts meet the coastal dunes in a narrow transition visible even from satellite images. We study two species pairs of desert shrubs ( Encelia ) that occur across this transition. Although these species can interbreed, they remain distinct. Using a combination of genetics, field experiments, three-dimensional imaging, and physiological measurements, we show that natural selection helps counteract homogenizing effects of gene exchange. Different habitats of t…

  DOI

• Toward Sustainable Biocultural Ecotourism: An Integrated Spatial Analysis of Cultural and Biodiversity Richness in Colombia

  People and Nature · 2024-11-25 · 14 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Ecotourism plays a vital role in both economic development and depending on the scale, it can also aid environmental conservation. Ecotourism planning often considers culture‐based and nature‐based tourism separately, failing to recognize the synergies between them, with the potential to market locations as biocultural destinations. Using Colombia as a case study, we created metrics of taxonomic biological diversity as measured by vertebrate species richness (including birds, mammals, f…

  PublisherDOI

• Global economic burden of unmet surgical need for appendicitis

  British journal of surgery · 2022 · 14 citations

  BACKGROUND: There is a substantial gap in provision of adequate surgical care in many low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to identify the economic burden of unmet surgical need for the common condition of appendicitis. METHODS: Data on the incidence of appendicitis from 170 countries and two different approaches were used to estimate numbers of patients who do not receive surgery: as a fixed proportion of the total unmet surgical need per country (approach 1); and based on country…

  DOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Modeling the Origin and Evolution of Hawaiian Plants

  NSF · $373k · 2021–2025

• EAGER: DynaMo: A novel computational workflow for dynamic monographs and revisionary systematics

  NSF · $280k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Erika J. Edwards

  Yale University

  758 shared

• John E. McCormack

  756 shared

• Sarah Samadi

  Institut de Systématique, Évolution, Biodiversité

  754 shared

• David Posada

  Galicia Sur Biomedical Foundation

  754 shared

• Tracy A. Heath

  754 shared

• Norman MacLeod

  Johnson Matthey (United Kingdom)

  754 shared

• Thorsten Lumbsch

  Field Museum of Natural History

  754 shared

• Rob Bryson

  754 shared

Labs

• Zapata LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Biology

  University of Missouri-St. Louis

  2010

• B.Sc., Biología

  Universidad de los Andes

  2000

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Lawren Sackh-95
• H. Bradley Shafferh-80
• Glen MacDonaldh-79