Research

I am interested in the study ecosystems as complex systems and in problems of scale in ecology. Among these problems I am interested in understanding (1) how large scale patterns of biological diversity develop and are maintained from local interactions among individuals, (2) how biological diversity is influenced by global changes, (3) the role of biological diversity for community structure and dynamics, and (4) how environmental complexity interact with biotic processes to maintain variability and diversity in communities. I address these questions by combining empirical (experiments, remote sensing) and theoretical (spatially-explicit modeling) approaches in order to link patterns and processes across scales. More precisely, much of my research is focused on understanding how diversity and other properties of marine communities emerge from local interactions among individuals.

One of the main goal of my research is to understand how the aggregation of species and space into functional groups or ``community elements'' can provide nontrivial information about community dynamics. I develop spatially-explicit models and simulations implementing local processes tested in the field. One of the questions underlying this work is to determine conditions maintaining communities in a critical state where scale invariance (i.e. power law relationships) are observed, and to understand the role of functional diversity in that process. I also use models to explore the role of metacommunity dynamics (large scale interactions among communities through larval dispersal) along biogeographic physical gradients for the maintenance of local and regional diversity. The development of metacommunity models is of great interest in coastal habitats in order to understand the influence of global changes on biological diversity. Another advantage of large-scale models is their use as a tool for the design of marine reserves. Linking patterns and processes responsible for creating a