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.