Team

Jan (Šuspa) Lepš

Jan is a plant ecologist specialized on community ecology, mechanisms maintaining species diversity and stability of plant communities. Together with his supervisor Marcel Rejmanek, he was of the first to stress the importance of species life histories for plant community stability in 1982. Further, he is specialized in multivariate analyses of ecological data, recently with particular emphasis on the analyses which include responses of species composition and traits, including intraspecific trait variability. All these aspects are directly connected with the relationship of trait composition and community stability.

Jan has two joint appointments, the major one at the Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, where he teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses, and a minor one in Department of Ecology and Nature Conservation, Institute of Entomology, Czech Academy of Sciences.

Francesco de Bello

Francesco is trained as a plant ecologist and agronomist. At present he is a researcher at the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and Associate Professor at the University of South Bohemia.

Using meadows and alpine vegetation as a study framework, he assesses the role of functional trait diversity on the interface between community assembly and ecosystem service delivery, with a special focus on methodological issues.

His interests also include the effects of land-use changes on vegetation, and particularly grazing and mowing, and the development of integrated biodiversity indicator systems to monitor the effects of these changes in interaction with climate change.

Enrique Valencia

Enrique is a researcher working in the fields of plant ecology, plant-soil interactions, community ecology and functional ecology.

He uses observational and experimental studies conducted at regional and local scales to evaluate the responses of the functional structure of plant communities to climate and land cover changes, and to determine how plant functional attributes ultimately affect ecosystem functioning in semi-arid Mediterranean ecosystems.

In addition, he is working on expanding and updating the analyses of patterns in temporal synchrony within different types of communities.

Marta Gaia Sperandii

Marta Gaia a young vegetation scientist with a strong focus on temporal ecology, currently working as a post-doc at the CIDE-CSIC in Francesco de Bello’s lab. Her research interests mostly center on analyzing temporal dynamics and understanding the mechanisms regulating the stability of plant communities.

She is passionate about collecting and analyzing field data (especially in coastal dunes and dry grasslands), but she is also enthusiastic about inspecting large datasets coming from a variety of systems to look for general ecological patterns.

Lars Götzenberger

Lars is an ecologist with a main interest in the ecological strategies of vascular plants. He tries to understand through which traits these different strategies manifest, how they evolved, and how they are connected to species co-existence and to temporal fluctuations in communities at different spatial and temporal scales.

He was a Co-PI on the project that initiated the LOTVS platform, and besides the scientific work within LOTVS he is also strongly involved in the technical aspects like data management and standardization. He is grateful to all the data collectors and contributors and looks forward to tackling exciting questions beyond the already published studies.

Vigdis Vandvik

Vigdis is professor of plant ecology at the University of Bergen in Norway and leader of bioCEED Centre of Excellence in Biology Education. Her research is focused on how major global change drivers – especially climate and land-use change – affect plants, from their physiological responses via population and community dynamics to ecosystem functioning.

She uses experimental macroecological approaches – replicating field experiments across broad geographical and climatic extents – to disentangle and explore context-dependencies and uncover general patterns in these responses. Field experiments offer many opportunities for student-active research, and her research projects are also test-beds for developing effective ways of teaching and learning as integral components of ‘real’ research projects.

She is an elected member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Norwegian Technical Science Academy. She communicates science through a variety of channels, and is actively involved in the science-policy interface, both within Norway and internationally, for example as a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Europe and Central Asia report (IPBES-ECA).

Robin Pakeman

Robin is a plant ecologist at the James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen.

In the early part of his career his research focussed on vegetation management and restoration, as well as on the key role of herbivores as seed dispersal agents. His more recent work has focused on the use of plant functional traits to understand how management affects vegetation and how in turn these changes propagate through to ecosystem processes and to other trophic levels.

He has been particularly interested in how grazing affects plant communities, which involves running the UK’s largest grazing experiment at Glen Finglas and being a member of the Soay Sheep project on St Kilda. Alongside this functional work he has continued to work on the conservation of biodiversity, developing biodiversity indicators and methods to prioritise interventions.

Lauren Hallett

Lauren is specialized in community and restoration ecology, particularly testing theory through field experiments. She has developed various R tools for the test of ecological theories of stability and compensatory dynamics.

Lauren is a Senior Scientist and Assistant Professor at the University of Oregon. Her goal is to produce “usable” science to improve ecosystem management. She use a combination of long-term data analysis, population modeling and field experiments to this end.

Her work spans a variety of systems, including rangelands, serpentine grasslands, woodlands and alpine.

Susan Harrison

Susan is a professor of ecology at the University of California, Davis, who works on the dynamics of natural populations and ecological diversity.

She is a fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the California Academy of Sciences. She has previously served as vice president of the American Society of Naturalist. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. She works on both the Californian grasslands and Oregon forest understories.

In her lab she seeks to understand the processes that shape and maintain plant species diversity at the landscape scale, where small-scale forces such as competition and facilitation interact with large-scale forces such as niche evolution and dispersal.  Much of her recent work focuses on the impacts of climatic drying on grassland community diversity.