Franciska De Vries is an Associate Professor at The University of Manchester. Her research interests are focused on the effects of land use and climate change on soil biodiversity, and subsequently on the effects of changes in soil biodiversity on ecosystem processes. She is particularly interested in how plants and soil microbial communities interact under…

Liesje Mommer‘s research focuses on  “belowground plant-plant interactions” within the Plant Ecology and Nature Conservation group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Recently, the theme of her research has expanded to include plant-fungal interactions, as root-root interactions cannot be understood without considering the myriad of microbes in the soil. To reveal these ‘hidden’ interactions and the consequences…

Yvonne Buckley is the Chair of Zoology at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is a quantitative ecologist with a research focus at population and community scales with applications in management of invasive species, habitat restoration, conservation and climate change adaptation. She spent a decade studying and working in the UK at Oxford and Imperial College…

Julieta Rosell is based in the Instituto de Ecología at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México – one of the largest Universities in Latin America. Julieta’s research focuses on plant ecology and evolution. She has worked on the functional ecology of woody stems, including mechanics, storage, and structure of bark and wood, along with the evolution of life forms in…