Mattia Menchetti

I use genetic data, mostly from ants, to work out how species came to be where they are, and how much of that people have rearranged.

The glacial cycles repeatedly forced populations into refugia and allowed them to expand again, and the resulting structure is still detectable in their genomes. Human transport moves species across the same landscape within decades.

I work at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, in Bonnie Blaimer's lab at the Center for Integrative Biodiversity Discovery. My current project, AntTRAILS, is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship testing how far back human influence can be detected in the genomes of Mediterranean ants. It is based on high-coverage sequencing of Pheidole across the region, and follows on from my earlier research, in which I assembled large genetic datasets for European ants.

Interpreting a distribution depends on knowing which species are on the map, so a good deal of the work is taxonomic. I have described three species new to science and found others that had been passing under names we already knew. It also depends on reference data being available, which is why I built the first comprehensive DNA barcode library for European ants, so that identification and biosurveillance can rest on open records. The same groundwork makes it possible to record change as it happens: non-native ants recorded for the first time in a country, and the first report of the fire ant Solenopsis invicta breeding in Europe.

My route here was not a direct one. I was publishing on behavioural ecology and biological invasions for several years before I started a PhD, and the questions have not changed much since, though the methods have. Before Berlin I was at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona and at the University of Florence, where I managed a National Geographic project on the long-distance migration of the painted lady, coordinating sampling by researchers and citizen scientists across Europe, East Asia and Africa.