It is predicted that climate change will remain one of the major drivers of biodiversity patterns in the future.

The project has the ambitious goal of protecting not only the usual biodiversity patterns of conservation areas but also the spatial components of evolutionary processes that enable species to adapt to potentially harmful changes.

This approach will provide a means of determining whether asymmetries in the climates of the two hemispheres really do translate into differences in biodiversity patterns.

In the framework of the BMBF-BIOTA-AFRICA project led by him, biodiversity patterns in Africa as a model continent are analyzed and potential impacts of climate change are investigated.

All biodiversity patterns previously described are related to time-independent quantities.

The effect of area on biodiversity patterns has been shown to be scale dependent, having the strongest effect among species with small geographical ranges compared to those species with large ranges who are affected more so by other factors such as the mid-domain and/or temperature.

Used the entire Census database to identify global hotspots of marine biodiversity across 13 major taxa, and identified water temperature as the main environmental predictor of biodiversity patterns in the ocean.

The project described biodiversity patterns of benthic and bentho-demersal communities on continental margins, with a focus on multiple habitats and spatial scales, and identifying the contribution of environmental heterogeneities to these patterns.

Williams became one of the pioneers of the statistical study of biodiversity patterns.

Indeed, if the extent to which abiotic differences between the hemispheres influence biodiversity patterns is to be better comprehended, several key issues deserve attention.