Oliveras Menor, Immaculada

I am Research Director in Disturbance Ecology and Global Change (DEGC) at the Institute de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD, France), and Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford (UK). I am based at the Centre of Botany and Modeling of Plant Architecture and Vegetation (AMAP), a world-leading institution in experimental plant sciences. From 2016-2022 I was Deputy Leader of Ecosystems Research Program and Departmental Lecturer at Oxford. I lead a large international research group (19 postdoc and PhD students) in DEGC to address the impacts of abiotic stressors and disturbances on the composition, structure and dynamics of natural and human-modified ecosystems. I am Scientific PI of the UE-Marie Curie RISE grant (€1.5M) FIRE-ADAPT, The Role of Integrated Fire management in climate change adaptation of tropical and subtropical ecosystems, and PI of the UK-NERC grant (€1.0M) NeoFIRE, Understanding and scaling vulnerability of Neotropical amazon and Transitional forests to altered FIRE regimes. I study how abiotic stressors (e.g. droughts, herbivory) and disturbances (fire) impact plant form and function at different ecological scales (organism, community, ecosystem, biome). My work has made substantial impacts on advancing knowledge of tropical ecosystems. I am active in various international networks (Global Ecosystems Monitoring, FlorestPlots, FIRE-ADAPT, PPBio Cerrado) and during the last five years my research has produced scientific advances in: (1) Deciphering how disturbance regimes are changing (e.g. pubs 8,15,18 in CV), (2) how changes in disturbance regimes impact ecosystems (e.g.1, 5, 25); (3) how tropical ecosystems are shifting in form and function (e.g. 4, 22, 27), and (4) how policies impact drivers of disturbance (e.g. 2, 11, 19). I have published 62 articles in prestigious journals in 2020-2024, of which 14 as senior author, 2 as first author, 5 articles in Nature/Science, and 8 articles in sister Nature/Science journals.