Jani Heino

PhD
Project manager
Biogeography

Geography
Faculty of Science

My current research can be put under the label ‘global change biogeography’. Most of my research focuses on the causes and consequences of environmental change at different spatial (from sites to continents) and temporal (from seasons to millennia) scales. I try to decipher environmental change mostly through the lens of variation in biological diversity in aquatic and terrestrial systems, which has a lot to do with my life-long interest in animals and plants. Along with both national and foreign collaborators, I have recently become interested in a more comprehensive framework incorporating both biotic and abiotic features of nature. As almost all areas across the world are affected by anthropogenic impacts, I am also currently devising a refined general framework that incorporates biotic, abiotic and human-altered features of drainage basins. At the level of a drainage basin, different phenomena are acting simultaneously and should be considered in monitoring, management, restoration and conservation of nature and ecosystem services. Finally, having been more like a hobby so far, I am also interested in earth history and how historical changes are associated with the development of civilizations and livelihoods of people today.

Check out and subscribe my Substack site where I am publishing an abridged version of my book on metasystems research:

https://janiheino.substack.com/

Selected publications

García-Girón, J., Múrria, C., Arnedo, M.A., Bonada, N., Cañedo-Argüelles, M., Derka, T., Fernández Calero, J.M., Li, Z., Tierno de Figueroa, J.M., Xie, Z. & Heino, J. (2024) A time-calibrated ‘Tree of Life’ of aquatic insects for knitting historical patterns of evolution and measuring extant phylogenetic biodiversity across the world. Earth-Science Reviews, in press.

Snåre, H., García-Girón, J., Alahuhta, J., Bini, L.M., Boda, P., Bonada, N., Brasil, L.S., Callisto, M., Castro, D.M.P., Chen, K., Csabai, Z., Datry, T., Domisch, S., García-Marquez, J.R., Floury, M., Friberg, N., Gill, B.A., González-Trujillo, J.D., Göthe, E., Haase, P., Hamada, N., Hill, M.J., Hjort, J., Juen, L., Jupke, J.F., Justino de Faria, A.P., Li, Z., Ligeiro, R., Linares, M.S., Andrade, A.L., Macedo, D.R., Mathers, K.L., Mellado-Diaz; A., Milosevic, D., Moya, N., Poff, N.L., Rolls, R.J., Roque, F.O., Saito, V.S., Sandin, L., Schäfer, R.B., Scotti, A., Siqueira, T., Martins, R.T., Valente-Neto, F., Wang, B., Wang, J., Xie, Z. & Heino, J. (2024) The relationships between biotic uniqueness and abiotic uniqueness are context dependent across drainage basins worldwide. Landscape Ecology 39: 84.

Alahuhta, J., García-Girón, J., Hjort, J., Salminen, H., Tukiainen, H. & Heino, J. (2024) Quantitative measurement of geodiversity uniqueness: research implications and conservation applications. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 382: 20230056.

Heino, J., Toivanen, M. & Alahuhta, J. (2023) Deciphering land-use influences on boreal lakes to guide landscape planning. Ecological Solutions and Evidence 4: e12242.

García-Girón, J., Bini, L.M. & Heino, J. (2023) Shortfalls in our understanding of the causes and consequences of functional and phylogenetic variation of freshwater communities across continents. Biological Conservation 282: 110082.

Rolls, R.J., Deane, D.C., Johnson, S.E., Heino, J., Anderson, M.J. & Ellingsen, K. E. (2023) Biotic homogenisation and differentiation as directional change in beta diversity: synthesising driver-response relationships to develop conceptual models across ecosystems. Biological Reviews 98: 1388-1423.

Li, Z., Heino, J., Zhang, J., Ge, Y., Liu, Z., & Xie, Z. (2023) Unravelling the factors affecting multiple facets of macroinvertebrate beta diversity in the World's Third Pole. Journal of Biogeography 50: 792-804.

Tukiainen, H., Maliniemi, T., Alahuhta, J., Hjort, J., Lindholm, M., Salminen, H., Snåre, H., Toivanen, M., Vilmi, A. & Heino, J. (2023) Quantifying alpha, beta and gamma geodiversity. Progress in Physical Geography 47: 140-151.

Heino, J., García‒Girón, J., Hämäläinen, H., Hellsten, S., Ilmonen, J., Karjalainen, J., Mäkinen, T., Nyholm, K., Ropponen, J., Takolander, A. & Tolonen, K.T. (2022) Assessing the conservation priority of freshwater lake sites based on taxonomic, functional and environmental uniqueness. Diversity and Distributions 28: 1966–1978.

Heino, J., Alahuhta, J., Bini, L.M., Cai, Y., Heiskanen, A.-S., Hellsten, S., Kortelainen, P., Kotamäki, N., Tolonen, K.T., Vihervaara, P., Vilmi, A. & Angeler, D.G. (2021) Lakes in the era of global change: moving beyond single-lake thinking in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services. Biological Reviews 96: 89-106.

Heino, J., Culp, J., Erkinaro, J., Goedkoop, W., Lento, J., Ruhland, K. & Smol, J.P. (2020) Abruptly and irreversibly changing Arctic freshwaters urgently require standardized monitoring. Journal of Applied Ecology 57: 1192-1198.

Personal Research Site

https://www.globiogeo.com/

Research interests

  • Biogeography
  • Spatial ecology
  • Taxonomic, phylogenetic and functional diversity
  • Meta-systems
  • Catchment sciences
  • Aquatic ecosystems
  • Environmental change
  • Environmental heterogeneity
  • Environmental history
  • Human-nature relationships

Researcher information

Research groups

Researcher profiles

JH

Contact information

E-mail

jani.heino@oulu.fi