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.

Dr. Marcer-Batlle has been a researcher at CREAF since 1995. His research focuses on the design and development of Information Systems applied to environmental management, especially in protected areas, and on the modelling of biodiversity and the analysis of its protection. He leads and coordinates projects for the development of software tools applied to different areas of environmental management, e.g. natural heritage management, protected areas, biodiversity databases and georeferencing of biological materials.