As a biologist, I have always been interested in community ecology, and what is more incredible than ecology in the Tropics? So, I have spent the last years of my career working on understanding forest recovery after human disturbances, from the perspective of tree communities in the tropical forests of Ecuador, from the Andean forests in the south to the Chocó forests in the Norwest of Ecuador.
In my thesis, I focus on the tree seedling recruitment and the dynamics of seedling-herbivore networks in a tropical secondary forest ecosystem. Plant-herbivore interactions are an important component of terrestrial biodiversity, especially in the tropical ecosystems where they represent one of the major conduits of energy flow. In our study, we will monitor tree seedling recruitment and seedling-herbivore interactions across a gradient of tropical rainforest recovery. Since functional diversity of plants can determine the intensity of herbivory, we will check the functional composition of the tree-seedling community, focusing on leaf functional traits such as thickness, toughness, specific leaf area, volatile diversity, and anti-herbivore chemical compounds in the leaves; traits related with herbivore pressure. As a proxy of invertebrate herbivore community and herbivory interactions, we will identify the different feeding guilds found in the tree-seedling leaves and quantify the intensity of the damage, studying how these tendencies change according to forest age. We will as well sample the insect herbivore communities in our successional forests. For our last study, we will make use of the P-REX set up to determine how the seedling communities recover after a human perturbation and how this is related to the adult trees present in the close surrounding. Our results can provide insights in the recovery potential of tropical networks, which may promote natural regrowth on deforested land.
