Gianluigi, who was recently awarded a Ramón y Cajal project to join CIDE, visited us to discuss future research lines. We visited plots of the network of “microrreservas” from the region of Valencia with his promotor, Emilio Laguna. Recently, we also published a review on intraspecific trait variability with Gian (Palacio et al. 2025).
Continue ReadingNews
Sampling week with the TraitDivNet crew
The TraitDivNet crew, specifically Carlos Carmona and his team, have spent some intense days sampling in our region, using the facilities of CIDE and enjoying some well deserved paella and horchata after the hard work. TraitDivNet is an open global network of researchers interested in plant traits launched in 2022. They aim to collect trait information […]
Continue ReadingFunctional Traits Course in Palermo
Francesco and Lars Götzenberger just gave another of their courses (Trait-based ecology: from theory to R tools), finally in person, in the city of Palermo, Sicily. The course, and also the food, were very much enjoyed. The event was organized by the National Biodiversity Future Center in Italy.
Continue ReadingDark diversity paper in Nature
Recently, our team, a close collaborator of Meelis Pärtel’s group in Estonia, published a paper in Nature. This paper presents one of the first results of the DarkDivNet initiative. The study shows that classic measures of diversity, based only on the sampled species, fail to reveal the impoverishment of the potential species pool caused by […]
Continue ReadingArrival of Vitor de Andrade Kamimura and Helena Streit
This month, Vitor de Andrade Kamimura and Helena Streit have joined our group from Brazil for a postdoctoral stay of nearly one year. During his visit to Francesco de Bello’s group, supported by a BEPE/FAPESP fellowship, Vitor is investigating how functional traits shape forest responses to environmental gradients and extreme events—from individuals to entire communities—using […]
Continue ReadingStudies with the German Exploratories
A couple of papers came out recently based on the collaboration with the German biodiversity explotatories on long term plots. These studies led by our former postdocs, Marta Gaia Sperandii (in Science Advances) and Manuele Bazzichetto (in Journal of Ecology) focus on the drivers of temporal stability of communities and their responses to extreme climatic […]
Continue Reading