This lab is interested in the distribution of bathymetric ranges of benthic deep-sea taxa and how boundaries to distribution determine parabolic patterns in deep-sea diversity observed in "real" taxa. These studies were motivated by a resurgence in interest in how the geographic ranges in terrestrial taxa correlate with latitudinal trends in species richness.

Using the distributional ranges of species to attack diversity problems is, of course, nothing new, and as R. McArthur pointed:

"The range of single species would seem to be the basic unit of biogeography. Curiously enough, the history of science often proceeds in a reverse order from expectations and this is very true in biogeography. Patterns on islands…, of species diversity…, and of tropical communities are already clear and even moderately well understood while patterns of single species' ranges still seem to be catalogs of special cases."

(p. 127. MacArthur R. H. (1972) Geographical ecology. Patterns in the distribution of species. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 269 pp.)

"Schematic representation of the geometric constraint model. Boundaries are denoted as MN (seasurface) and MX (deepest region) while mn and mx represent the minimum and maximum depth of occurrence of a species. Black circles represent species' mean depth of occurrence. The upper panel shows species mean depth of occurrence and their vertical range. It is shown how the vertical range is determined by the proximity of a boundary. The vertical range is equal to 2 times the distance of the species Md to the closest barrier. The lower panels are a schematic representation of the relationship between the VR and Md. The shaded triangle represents tje constraint envelope for Vr - Md values. According to the model, VR values outside the triangle are impossible. Equations provide VR when the range is restricted by a boundary. The left side of the panel shows the case where the minimum depth of occurrence is equal to the shallow barrier, mn = MN, while the right side of the panel describes the case where mx = MX. Thus, a species with Md close to MX has a vertical range VR=MX-mn." (Pineda, 1993)