Research interests

• Community ecology
• Habitat fragmentation
• Biogeography
• Conservation biology
• Biodiversity monitoring
• Bat ecology

 

 

 

Scientific projects

For my PhD I conducted field work in Panama at the field station of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) on Barro Colorado Island where I investigated the effects of rainforest fragmentation on Neotropical bats, using small islands in Gatún Lake, an artificial reservoir created during the construction of the Panama Canal, as a model system.

I then worked as a postdoc on a project evaluating the suitability of bats for long-term monitoring within the framework of the Tropical Ecology, Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) Initiative. TEAM was set up by Conservation International in an effort to quantify and project, for a variety of different taxa and involving a pantropical network of field sites, long-term trends in biodiversity in response to anthropogenic drivers of change (e.g. climate change, habitat fragmentation). This monitoring network will provide crucial long-term data on the status, population and community parameters of certain focal species groups and thus help develop guidelines pertinent to defining effective conservation actions. I was synthesizing existing data sets from community studies on bats that have been conducted by a variety of researchers throughout the tropics to determine whether an appropriate and cost-efficient monitoring protocol can be established for bats similar to those that have already been developed and are now being implemented for other taxa.

Currently, I am a postdoctoral research fellow in Portugal.