CREAF Talk with Claire Fortunel - "Abiotic and biotic drivers of tree dynamics"

TITLE: "Abiotic and biotic drivers of tree dynamics"

DATE: Thursday, 11th November 2024.

TIME & FORMAT: form 12 to 1pm CET - In-person and online.

Seminars will combine in-person and online formats (CREAF, Sala Graus II, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) but in all cases, talks will be always streamed (not recorded), so they can be followed online.

HOW TO CONNECT: direct link to the conference.

SUMMARY OF THE WORKSHOP:

Forests represent an important terrestrial biome: they harbor a high biodiversity and play a major role in global biogeochemical cycles, thereby providing many services to humans, both at the local (food, timber, medicines) and global (carbon stocks, climate regulation) scales. But forests are threatened by global changes, in particular by anthropogenic activities and climate change, and a challenge for scientists is to better understand the drivers of tree dynamics to improve predictions of the future of forests. A promising way forward is to examine the role of multiple mechanisms interacting at different scales on tree dynamics. Here I will present work that aims to evaluate the separate and joint role of abiotic and biotic drivers of tree dynamics, and the role of species differences in their functional traits in shaping tree response to these drivers.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Claire Fortunel is a research scientist with the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD), and co-lead of the ‘Dynamics and Assembly of Tropical Forests‘ group at the Joint Research Unit for Botany and Modelling of Plant Architecture and Vegetation (AMAP) in Montpellier, France. She studies the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms shaping community structure and dynamics, and the consequences for ecosystem processes, in particular in plant systems. Her research integrates aspects of community ecology, functional ecology and phylogenetics. She uses a combination of field-based observational studies, experimental manipulations, and statistical modelling to study the processes that shape communities and ecosystems.