Modelling of Biodiversity Lab (MOBI Lab) is a research group led by Petr Keil at Faculty of Environmental Sciences (FZP CZU) in Prague, Czech Republic.

We study:

• Temporal change of biodiversity. Biodiversity is under pressure from human actions. Intensive agriculture, deforestation, overexploitation, climate change, or biological invasions all change nature. We study where, why, and how fast this happens.
• Geographic distribution of biodiversity. Why are some places on Earth full of living things, while other places aren’t? Why are there less than 100 species of trees all boreal forests in Eurasia and North america, but hundreds of species in as little as 50 ha in a tropical forest of South America or Asia?
• Statistics, machine learning, spatial and temporal scale. We develop new models for big and messy data of the 21^st century. We are interested in scientific methodology, statistics, machine learning, and artifacts related to physical constraints, geometry, and scales.
• Ecological patterns. We seek general patterns, not anecdotes nor local context. To quote Robert MacArthur (1972, Geographical Ecology): "The concept of pattern or regularity is central to science. Pattern implies some sort of repetition, and in nature it is usually an imperfect repetition. The existence of the repetition means some prediction is possible--having witnessed an event once, we can partially predict its future course when it repeats itself."