My work at the Madidi project

The Madidi project is a botanical project in collaboration between the Missouri Botanical Garden and the "Herbario Nacional de Bolivia". The main goals of the project are to describe and document the flora of a tropical forest: the Madidi region, and to study the structure and dynamics of plant species, while contributing to the conservation of tropical forests. The project consist in a network of large and small plots where all the adult trees have been censed and measured, which covers a broad elevational range within the Madidi Region of Northwestern Bolivia.

As an undergraduate, I worked as thesis student at this project where, I have learnt and contributed with the herbarium and field work. During that period, I worked on my degree Thesis on the Taxonomy of four sections of the genus Inga for Bolivia. After graduating, I continued working for the project as Technician, where I collected data on functional traits and participated in a couple of field expeditions to the plots.

In 2016, I joined the Dr. Ricklef's lab as a master student. There I continued working with data from this project for my thesis, where I studied the Changes in Andean Tropical forest communities’ composition and diversity.

If you are interested, here you can find more information about the Madidi Project.

Lic. Thesis

Abstract Proper delimitation and identification of species is vital for the knowledge of the plant diversity in general and specially in megadiverse countries like Bolivia. Despite the development of other taxonomic classification methods, the morphological taxonomy is still very important due to the fact that it is more practical, cheaper and its results are reliable. The morfometric analysis provides in particular, repeatability and objectivity. At present Bolivia does not have an updated treatment of the genus Inga, from the Fabaceae family, for this reason this work pretends to provide a taxonomic revision of the sections Complanatae, Inga and Tetragonae, and their species represented in the country, based on morphological analysis. I chose to work with this genus because of its ecological, economic and social importance. For the morphometric analysis, a principal component analysis was realized, which confirm the separation of the predefined species by Pennington in 1997. In addition a new species of the Complanatae section was described and the presence of I. feuillei in Bolivia was confirmed. Based in the data collected and the result of the PCA, the taxonomic treatment was elaborated for the three sections with their respective species. This work includes de description of the species, their distribution and conservation status in Bolivia, and some information about the recorded phenology.

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MsC. Thesis

Abstract During the last few thousand years, human population growth and resource use has been reshaping the planet’s nutrient cycles, climate and biodiversity and might be causing significant changes to spatial and temporal patterns in the distribution of species, and a general erosion of biodiversity at global scales. Many studies have been looking to model and predict how species could respond to actual rates of change on environmental conditions, with a high interest in terms of species distribution and richness with potential extinctions. However, how global change impact local communities still remains unclear. Moreover, previous research suffers from a significant bias against Tropical montane regions. In this study, we evaluate whether diversity and composition of communities in an Andean Tropical forest are changing, potentially in response to changes in environmental conditions. We analyze the dynamics in 26 forest plots that are part of a larger network of nearly 490 plots located on the eastern slopes of the Bolivian Andes. We quantify mortality and recruitment rates, document changes in diversity and compare changes in species composition to null model expectations. We have that mortality and recruitment rates occur at about 1.6% per year, and that richness seems to be increasing in regions of cold climates, but decreasing in warm regions. Finally, we find evidence that community composition is shifting across all environmental conditions. Our analyses support the idea that communities in the Tropical Andes are going through changes consistent with an effect of global change. However, the final causes for the changes we observe are yet unknown. Understanding the responses of forest communities is urgently needed to advance theory in community ecology, but also to understand and manage natural ecosystems in a changing World.

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