About us
Functional Ecophysiology and Biogeography of Terrestrial Ecosystems
Welcome to our group’s homepage! We are a research group based at CREAF and at the Ecology Unit (Department of Animal Biology, Plant Biology and Ecology, BABVE) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).
Our group is devoted to the study of the functioning and dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems, and how they are being impacted by global change. We do so by combining different approaches (observational, experimental, modelling) and scales (from individual organisms to global) in different biomes (Mediterranean, boreal, temperate, tropical). Our ultimate aim is to improve our understanding of how ecosystems work and respond to global environmental change, and applying this knowledge to promote human wellbeing in a healthy Biosphere.
The specific challenge we address is improving our capacity to understand, monitor, predict and manage the dynamics of terrestrial vegetation under climatic stress. We do so by:
- Improving our understanding of the role of functional diversity in ecosystem dynamics
- Characterizing the mechanisms and the limits of ecosystem resilience to climatic extremes,
- Developing ecosystem monitoring and forecasting schemes
- Developing art-science interaction schemes to deepen ecological knowledge and change societal attitudes
The main methodological approaches we use include:
- Plant hydraulics and water relations
- Chemical ecology
- Metabolomics
- Plant gas exchange at the leaf/soil/canopy levels
- Sap flow
- Ecosystem scale measurements of water
- CO2 and trace gas fluxes
- Stable isotopes
- Dendrochronology
- Forest demography
- Curation and analysis of large-scale ecological datasets
- Process-based modelling of ecological dynamics, art-science interactions
Please check out our laboratory handbook, which encapsulates the philosophy and functioning of our group for current and prospective group-members.