Jesus Aguirre Gutierrez

The biosphere is experiencing unprecedented changes in biodiversity and restructuring of species composition at local and global scales with around one million species threatened with extinction, posing a threat to the functioning of ecosystems and human well-being. My interest lies in developing a deep understanding of the effects of environmental changes on trait community composition across time and space. I study how the community trait composition of vegetation and insect pollinators responds to climatic and land-use changes in temperate and tropical forest ecosystems. I am particularly interested in merging ecological and remote sensing tools as to understand the impacts of a changing climate on biodiversity and its contributions to people (e.g. pollination). The goal is to contribute to our understanding on the resilience of natural ecosystems to environmental changes and how such changes in biodiversity as a response to environmental change affects the ecosystems functioning and its contributions to peoples' livelihoods. The PhD student could work on issues related to investigating how a changing climate is shaping the current and future plant and pollinators distributions in forests ecosystems. Particularly, the PhD student will work on deciphering how to model and map the plant and pollinator functional trait composition of forests ecosystems using a suit of techniques related to: 1) species distribution models (SDM's), 2) Trait-based ecology, 3) Spectral and Structural remote sensing (e.g. Sentinel-2 and GEDI) and 4) plant -pollinator interaction networks.

Qualifications and Experience

PhD in Ecology; MSc Ecology and Evolution -Tropical Ecology; License degree (4.5 years) in Biology; I have supervised more than 15 master students in projects related to pollination ecology and tropical forest ecology and remote sensing in the Netherlands and the UK, many of them have been able to obtain a publication from their research work. Currently I co-supervise a PhD student at ECI working on impacts of climate change on the distribution of plant species in Africa