 Collecting samples of Cryptantha flava in the Rocky Mountains | I was born in Seville (Spain) in 1981, and I lived in Badajoz and El Puerto de Santa Maria, both in Spain, before I started my BSc in Environmental Sciencies at UCA. I did my MSc at a combined program in Management of Natural Resources between UCA and Kingston University of London, where I modeled the population dynamics of the woody species Rhododendron ponticum L. (Ericaceae) in order to study its demographic sustainability and to determine the weakest life cycle stages for conservation/eradication purposes - R. ponticum is an endangered species in the Iberian peninsula, and an invasive species in the UK.
After my masters, I worked as an associate researcher in two projects. First, in Vienna, at the Faculty Centre of Biodiversity (former Institute of Botany and Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna), I studied the effects of abiotic factors such as altitude and distance from mainland on the types of speciation (anagenesis vs. cladogenesis), taxonomic richness and endemisms of plants in the main archipelagos of the world. In the second position, at the University of Seville and group EVOCA, I was involved in a project exploring the effects of habitat fragmentation on the Mediterranean forest vegetation.
I obtained my PhD in the program of Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity at the Department of Biology of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in 2011. The overarching question I addressed in my doctoral thesis was how and why plants decrease in size, an overlooked ecological phenomenon, and what are the evolutionary implications of plant shrinkage at the whole individual and population levels.
Currently I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany. Here, I am exploring questions related to senescence in plants by means of carrying out comparative analyses with projection matrix models and integral projection models, as well as continuing long-term demographic censuses (15 years and counting!) in a desert perennial species in the Great Basin desert (example photo below).
Doing demography on a population of Cryptantha flava in Utah |
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