Dave Armitage He/Him
Rice University, USA
Dave is a community ecologist seeking to understand the maintenance and functional consequences of diversity in ecosystems. His work combines modeling and experiments to investigate how key interactions such as plant-microbe mutualisms and interspecific competition affect species’ geographic distributions and rates of ecosystem processes, with a particular focus on how these interactions vary across environmental gradients. He also has interests in the evolutionary ecology of carnivorous plants and on responses of plant communities to disturbance.

Maud Bernard-Verdier She/Her
Free University of Berlin, Germany
Maud is a community ecologist working in invasion biology and evolutionary ecology. Her research focuses on understanding how communities are structured in space and time, shaping biodiversity and influencing ecosystem functioning. She uses empirical approaches in the field or greenhouse to quantify trait and phylogenetic patterns in communities and populations. She is generally excited about conceptual thinking, on issues from biodiversity metrics to ecological novelty. A plant ecologist at the core, her work has focused on grassland systems, from New Zealand rangelands to urban wastelands.

Anny Chung She/Her
University of Georgia, USA
Anny is plant and microbial ecologist, working at the interface of population and community ecology. Research in her lab spans a broad range of topics from microbial community assembly, plant-soil feedbacks, competition and coexistence, range edge dynamics, to the effects of climate change on soil fungal communities.

Alessio Collalti He/Him
Forest Modelling Lab, National Research Council of Italy, Italy
Alessio’s research concerns forest ecology and eco-physiology, carbon and nitrogen cycle, forest and vegetation modelling, particularly with regard to numerical modelling and response of plants and forests to natural and anthropogenic stress, including climate change impacts and forest management scenarios. Alessio Collalti has a Master Science Degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Rome and a Ph.D. in Forest Ecology at the University of Tuscia in Viterbo. He is currently the Forest Modelling Lab. head and a researcher at CNR.

Manuel Delgado-Baqueriz He/Him
Pablo de Olavide University, Spain
Manuel is an ecosystem ecologist with a strong multidisciplinary background in soil microbial ecology, global environmental change, historical legacies, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. His work aims to advance our knowledge of soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems, and combines global surveys and experimental setups.

Anahí Espindola She/Her
University of Maryland, USA
Anahí is interested in understanding the effect of environmental variations on the ecology and evolution of inter-species interactions, with a particular preference for pollination interactions. Because her work seeks to connect ecological and evolutionary processes, her research is integrative by nature, combining phylogenetic, phylogeographic, geospatial, experimental, and ecological analyses.

Justine Karst She/Her
University of Alberta, Canada
Justine studies the mycorrhizal ecology of forests. Her research program addresses the functional and community responses of ectomycorrhizal fungi to forest disturbances, the role of mycorrhizas in forest restoration, and linkages between mycorrhizas and ecosystem processes.

Anne Kempel She/Her
University of Bern, Switzerland
Anne is a community ecologist interested in the factors that maintain biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Particularly, her work focusses on how biotic interactions, such as between plants and their enemies or mutualists, contribute to biodiversity maintenance, the distribution of plant species and the functioning of ecosystems, and how such interactions vary along abiotic or biotic gradients. Her research combines experimental field and laboratory studies to investigate these questions at both large and small spatial scales.

Johannes M H (Jean) Knops He/Him
Xi’an Jiaotong – Liverpool University, China.
Jean is an ecologist interested in the drivers that control biodiversity and the importance of biodiversity in ecosystem functioning. Current research emphasis is on examining plant diversity and plant – herbivore interactions in Qinghai-Tibetan alpine meadows and developing a framework to study biodiversity in the rapidly changing urban and rural environments in China.

Jalene LaMontagne She/Her
DePaul University, USA
Jalene is a population ecologist and is broadly interested in the patterns and drivers of spatial synchrony across scales. A particular interest is in the phenomenon of mast seeding, a reproductive pattern in many plant populations that is an emergent pattern from individuals, and has links to climatic drivers. Her research spans local to continental scales, and has implications for consumer-resource dynamics. Her research also includes how land use is related to tree condition and habitat availability in urbanized environments, with a focus on tree hollows.

Zeqing Ma He/His
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Zeqing is a root ecologist studying the intersection of ecology and biogeography. His research focuses on root and mycorrhizal symbioses structure and function, and their roles in belowground carbon, water, and nutrient cycling. He currently works on root eco-physiological processes across scales ranging from cells to ecosystems, to better characterize belowground ecological strategies.

Renske Onstein She/Her
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Germany
Renske’s research focuses on understanding how functional traits and environments have affected the macroevolutionary diversification of flowering plants, explaining diversity patterns across a range of temporal and spatial scales. She particularly enjoys working in biodiversity hotspots – from Mediterranean-type ecosystems to tropical rainforests (Madagascar). Her latest work deals with the co-evolutionary dynamics between (palm) fruits and frugivores.

Catherine Preece She/Her
University of Antwerp, Belgium
Catherine is a plant and soil ecologist whose current work focuses on the effects of global change on plant-soil interactions. Recently, she is also particularly interested in differences in root and rhizosphere traits between crops and their wild relatives. She also studies the feedbacks between plant and soil function and diversity, and the importance of soil communities for ecosystem stability.

Mizanur Rahman He/Him
Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), Bangladesh
Mizanur is a tropical plant ecologist, broadly interested in understanding plant response to global environmental changes. He applies several research approaches and tools including tree-ring analysis, wood anatomy, stable isotope analysis, and modelling to investigate the ecological and physiological mechanisms associated with the functioning of tropical forests in a global change context. He is also interested in understanding the role of tropical forests in the global carbon and hydrological cycles.

Riikka Rinnan She/Her
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Riikka has a broad background in ecosystem ecology, and her research interests include processes related to carbon cycle, ecosystem-atmosphere interactions, and climate change. Her current research focuses on the abiotic and biotic controls of volatile organic compound exchange in plants, soils, and ecosystems – especially in the Arctic.

Anna Schweiger She/Her
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Anna is an ecologist broadly interested in ecological remote sensing. She studies the association between plant spectra, plant form and function, and develops approaches for the remote detection and monitoring of biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem services across biological, spatial, and temporal scales. She has experience with modelling and mapping plant traits and functional groups, the detection of plant species and disease, with developing spectral diversity metrics, and with investigating animal movement patterns using remote sensing data.

Ellen Simms She/Her
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Ellen’s research is focussed on understanding evolution in natural populations. She is especially interested in the evolutionary implications of ecological interactions between plants and other organisms, including herbivores, pathogens, and mutualists. Ellen also studies ecological and physiological trade-offs and genetic mechanisms that constrain the evolution of plant traits important to these interactions. She also applies ecological and evolutionary theory to study evolution of cooperation, plant conservation, and control of invasive species.

Qiuying Tian She/Her
Chinese Academy of Sciences,
China
Qiuying’s research encompasses all aspects of global change ecology, especially exploring the linkages between aboveground and belowground processes in regulating the structure and functioning of grassland ecosystem, and their responses to global change factors, such as nitrogen deposition and precipitation. Her current research is mainly focused on understanding the contributions of soil element dynamics in soil, nutrient-acquisition strategies of plants and plant-soil interactions in regulating aboveground community composition and biodiversity variation.

Kyle Tomlinson He/Him
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Kyle studies plant ecology and conservation in ecosystems subject to natural or anthropogenic disturbances, using community monitoring, comparative research, and macroecological methods. His research interests include: describing the ecology and evolution of spiny plants (largely a functional response to mammalian herbivory), delimiting the extent and diversity of C4 savannas and grasslands in Asia (systems subject to fire), and understanding plant community responses to fragmentation and climate change (systems subject to anthropogenic change).

Dedmer B. Van de Waal He/Him
Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), The Netherlands
Dedmer studies the ecology of phytoplankton, with emphasis on harmful algal blooms. He is interested in how physiological processes at the cellular level can explain ecological interactions at the population and community level. He applies, connects and develops trait-based approaches and stoichiometric theory to cross these various organizational scales. Furthermore, he applies experimental ecological methods across these scales, from small bottle experiments to understand targeted physiological processes to large mesocosms to reveal overall community and food-web responses.

Sarah Whorley She/Her
Daemen College, USA
Sarah is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Daemen College in Buffalo, NY. She is a freshwater ecologist who specializes in stream ecology and periphytic algae. Her research focuses on examining the effects of anthropogenic activities (agriculture and urbanization) affect stream water quality and periphytic algal biochemical properties and taxonomic composition.

Biao Zhu He/Him
Peking University, China
Biao is an ecosystem ecologist who works on the responses and feedbacks of belowground processes to global changes. His current research focusses on four areas: (1) Plant-soil interactions under global change; (2) Linkage between plant traits and ecosystem processes; (3) Deep soil carbon dynamics in response to climate change; and (4) Nutrient regulation of carbon cycling in tropical forests.