STOIKOS

Roger Grau-Andrés is a researcher at the EDM team supported by the STOIKOS project since June 2023. His research has focused on studying how plant communities, soil biota, and ecosystem functioning respond to global change factors and environmental gradients. During his PhD in Glasgow (UK) he studied the effects of fire on plant communities and greenhouse gas exchange in heathlands. Throughout his postdoctoral work in the US and Sweden he studied how altered precipitation regimes or loss of plant functional groups affect plant and soil biota communities and carbon cycling in wetlands and boreal forests. Within STOIKOS, he investigates how the elemental composition of organisms influence their functional traits, and how elemental diversity drives ecosystem functioning.

Écio Souza Diniz is a postdoctoral researcher at the EDM team supported by the ERC-STOIKOS project. His MSc addressed topics on forest dynamics and succession. During his PhD, he devoted research to assessing functional and phylogenetic relationships among plants and their drivers (e.g., environmental constrictions, interactions, stochastic factors). Then, in his previous postdoctoral positions, he reached higher levels of interdisciplinarity by encompassing different and complementary approaches from GIS and remote sensing, statistical modelling and machine learning, field spectroscopy, landscape ecology, and forest management. Within the scope of the STOIKOS project, he will address questions on the optimal dimensionality of plant elemental composition for predicting forest ecosystem functioning, relationships among elemental diversity and phylogenetic relatedness, and predictions of forest element stocks.

Filipe Manuel Andrade de Matos is a PhD student of the EDM research team supervised by Dr. Marcos Fernández-Martínez. Within the framework of the ERC-STOIKOS project, Filipe will work with the concept of elementomes and elemental diversity using advanced statistical and modelling techniques in order to provide generalisable results amongst taxa and different levels of biological organisation.

Linking aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, nutrient cycling in freswhater and riparian forest ecosystems.

Roberto Molowny-Horas has worked at CREAF as a research technician since 2003. His research interests include environmental sciences, applied statistics and numerical ecology. He has numerous publications in high-impact journals, focusing mostly on the statistical analysis and modeling of dynamic phenomena in ecology and forestry sciences. Those study subjects include land cover changes in Mediterranean and Boreal landscapes, modeling of forest dynamics, theoretical studies of interaction networks in species communities and the impact of insecticides on bee populations, among others. Roberto has also been a visiting researcher at the Univerité de Montréal (UM, Canada) and currently cooperates with scientists from national (CTFC, UPC) and international (UM, UNIBO in Italy) research institutions.

Dr. Preece is a researcher at Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentàries. Her research focuses on how to increase carbon sequestration in agricultural soils. She is a specialist in plant-soil interactions, particularly in response to global change, and the characteristics of roots in wild relatives of crops. She is collaborating with the EDM in the framework of the ERC-StG STOIKOS to study the differences in elemental composition of crop wild relatives and modern crops.

Prof. Peñuelas is one of the most influential ecologists working today, and is a highly cited scientist in ecology/environment, in plant and animal sciences, agricultural sciences, geosciences and in all science fields of the ISI essential science indicators. His fields of specialization are: global ecology, global change, climate change, pollution, atmosphere-biosphere, Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds emissions, remote sensing, plant ecophysiology, functioning and structure of terrestrial plants and ecosystems, chemical ecology, ecometabolomics, microbial ecology, macroecology, evolutionary ecology, biogeochemistry with special focus on phosphorus, environmental sustainability, food security and global health. At CREAF, he leads the Global Ecology Unit.