Kenneth James Feeley (CV)
Smathers Chair of Tropical Tree Biology
Department of Biology
The University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL USA 33146
kjfeeley@gmail.com
Catherine Bravo obtained her Master degree at FIU under the supervision of Dr. Ken Feeley in 2013. She did her research in the cloudforest of Manu National Park in Peru, focusing on plant functional traits of mountain trees along an elevational gradient. She has 4 years of experience working in education and capacity building for organizations such as The Organization for Tropical Studies, Network of Conservation Educators and Practitioners, and Tropical Andes Alliance. Catherine has returned to Dr. Feeley’s lab to continue her research in Peru looking at plant community assembly in mountain forests.
Belen Fadrique earned her B.S. in Biology from the Universidad del Pais Vasco (Spain) and her M.Sc. of Biodiversity of Tropical Areas and Conservation from Spain’s Universidad Menendez Pelayo and Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC). For her master thesis she studied liana distribution along an altitudinal gradient in the Ecuadorian Andes, which continues among her interests. Belén is interested in forest dynamics and plant species distributions. For her PhD she is working on how the multiple Bamboo species that occur along the Andes-Amazon gradient in Peru distribute and what physiological characteristics are responsible. She is also concern about how bamboo affects plant communities in the cloud forests and the Amazon. Belen is also involved on the study on how undergoing global change is promoting altitudinal species migrations in the Andes.
James Stroud completed his B.Sc. (Hons) in Zoology and Conservation from the University of Wales, Bangor, focussing his dissertation research on the habitat factors affecting herpetofauna community composition in a tropical rainforest (Sulawesi, Indonesia), with the assistance of Dr. Graeme Gillespie and Dr. Wolfgang Wuster. Following this he completed his M.Sc. by Research at the Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences (CEMS) at the University of Hull, under the supervision of Dr. Philip Wheeler. His primary research involved investigating the spatial ecology of the European adder (Vipera berus) in commercially managed forest plantations and testing the suitability of patch occupancy modelling for monitoring of this species. His research interests are broad, with a general focus on landscape and community ecology, often using herpetofauna as model species and study systems. Other areas of interest include behavioural ecology, evolution of (polymorphic) mating systems, terrestrial vertebrate ecology and invasion biology.
http://www.jameststroud.com/
Timothy Perez graduated from the University of Vermont in 2010 with a BSc in Plant Biology. Before joining the Feeley lab at Florida International University in 2014, his interests in ecology developed from his participation in a myriad of projects such as sage grouse habitat assessments, clearwing butterfly ecology research, a chronosequence tree census, and development of an environmental education curriculum. The time that Tim spent in the Neotropics galvanized him to study the effects of climate change on processes including tropical forest dynamics, biodiversity, community ecology and phylogeny. Through science education, he hopes to share what he learns beyond the academic community.
Christine Pardo got her undergraduate degree at Florida International University where she founded the award-winning undergraduate ecology club. She worked as a research assistant for Dr. Ken Feeley in Peru and for Dr. Steve Oberbauer in Alaska and as a summer REU research assistant at Harvard Forest. She started her doctoral program with Dr. Ken Feeley in 2016. Christine’s dissertation research will explore biological invasions. Specifically, she will investigate why some species succeed and others fail to invade South Florida with a specific focus on introduced woody plants. Her plan is to analyze multiple factors of invasiveness such as introduction history, propagule pressure, species traits, and habitat characteristics to answer her research questions. The overarching goal of her proposed research is to provide a new perspective on local invasions to allow for management agencies to better predict and control for the effects of species invasions.
upwithclimate 