The Northwest School , Seattle, Washington, 1985-1989. B.S. Major areas of study include literature, philosophy, Russian language and culture, natural history, entomology and arachnology. Dr. Gustavo Hormiga , Dr. Jonathan Coddington . Working in the face of an increasing extinction rate places urgency on efforts to document the magnitude and breadth of contemporary biodiversity. Spiders are the seventh most diverse order on earth and have a relatively well understood phylogenetic structure for a group of their size.
Megadiverse groups are well suited to documenting declines both at the species and clade levels.
The magnitude of spider biodiversity can be investigated using species accumulation curves and non-parametric species richness estimators. Coddington and his collaborators have conducted intensive and comparable spider richness studies in the Americas, Africa and Europe. The breadth of spider biodiversity is investigated by systematic studies at all phylogenetic levels. Collecting expeditions, especially in the tropics, routinely yield new or poorly known taxa. When these specimens are examined in detail for phylogenetically informative morphological characters or sequenced for molecular characters, the results can have relevance to all kinds of evolutionary questions.