About me
Hi!
I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecological Interactions Lab led by Dr. Jef Vizentin-Bugoni (Institute of Biology, UFPel) in Pelotas (RS), Brazil. I was born in Colombia and started my career hoping to become an agronomist, but somehow I ended up as a biologist interested in community ecology, species interaction, ecosystem processes, and ecological modeling.
I created this website to share my work and my general interests outside academic formality.
Research topic
I am an ecologist with a deep curiosity for understanding how species interactions and functional diversity mediate ecological processes. My background has involved mammals, birds, and pollinators as model systems and the use of quantitative methods and field experiments to address my questions. During my PhD, I studied the mechanisms that regulate the contribution of pollinators to the production of pollination-dependent crops in Argentina (South America). This research had a deep focus on developing management strategies for the pollination service to improve crop productivity. I am a collaborator in projects studying how within-farm spatial management can promote pollinator conservation in large-scale crops, and the factors modulating the local congregation of honeybee males in agricultural landscapes. Currently, I am mainly involved in two projects: (i) disentangling biotic and abiotic factors affecting non-trophic interactions of tropical birds in Panama (Army Ant Followers Project), and (ii) exploring the mechanisms explaining temporal dynamics of seed dispersal networks in Hawaii (Hawaii-VINE. Project). See further details in the Project section.
Research interests
- Ecological interactions
- Pollination and frugivory
- Ecosystem services
- Community ecology
- Functional diversity
- R programming
- Bayesian statistics
What I like/love
- Biking.
- Literature (Dostoyevski, García Márquez, Sábato, and Vasili Grossman are personal friends).
- Dark beer.
- Animals in general, but particularly pollinators, bats, cats and dogs.
