CURRENT RESEARCH
TROPICAL AND TEMPERATE DIVERSITY
PREVIOUS RESEARCH
Disturbance Ecology
For my bachelor’s thesis I studied the floristic composition changes through time and the influence of soil and sunlight on the composition in natural tree fall gaps of different sizes and ages of recovery at one of the Biological Station of the Project Amazonas, Madre Selva in Loreto, Peru. One of the main results of my research was that while species diversity was dependent on the gap’s size and age, species density was influenced by light intensity and soil type. Also, I concluded that natural tree fall gaps are an important source of heterogeneity for lowland forests, since the similarity of species composition among different gaps was low. |
Systematic revision for Calophyllum in South America
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The genus Calophyllum is found throughout the Tropics in the New and Old Worlds. This genus has an obscure morphological variation. In South America (SA) it has a broad habitat occurrences in both flooded and non-flooded forests having clay soil, and white and brown sand soils. In order to understand the patterns of morphological variation among the SA species, I observed morphological and anatomical leaf characters, which were measured and analyzed with ordination methods at different geographical scales. Among the most significant results, anatomical characters were found to be more informative and reliable to unveil constant variation than morphological ones. As part of the revision, four species were recognized for SA, including one new species, as well as the description of a new species from Central America. |