Phd candidate (co-advised with Juan Arroyo)
I am a community ecologist widely interested in the mechanisms of biodiversity maintenance in nature. My two main current projects focus on plants in terrestrial ecosystems (grasslands) to understand how the interaction between abiotic (e.g. nutrient availability) and biotic (e.g. multiple species interactions) factors determine the ability of plants to coexist. In one of these projects, I assess how a global change driver such as nitrogen deposition and the release of leaf pathogens modify plant interactions and, thus, their coexistence mechanisms. In the other, I try to reveal the effect that network structure and interaction type have on plant coexistence in a complex plant-plant-herbivore network.
I am also intrigued by the capacity of plants to communicate with their peers, so I am developing some projects to explore the importance of plant-plant communication in maintaining diversity in natural communities. Additionally, and following the Messylab’s ideas to bring together all types of ecosystems, I am interested in the spatial scale of biodiversity using freshwater and marine intertidal metacommunities.
