BC3. Basque centre for climate change – Klima aldaketa ikergai

Short CV

I am currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project “Ecosystem recovery dynamics and their responses to climate change and habitat fragmentation” (RECODYN) lead by Daniel Montoya, at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) in Leioa, Spain. This project aims at understanding the ecological mechanisms underlying ecosystem recovery dynamics and how they are affected by global change. Our experimental field work takes place at the Metatron (CNRS – SETE, Moulis, France), where we monitor plant and insect communities to analyse biodiversity, community structure, and ecosystem functioning.

My research, so far, focused on chemical ecology of plant-invertebrate interactions. My interests lie in deepening our understanding of what affects such interactions, how they evolved, and the underlying morpho-chemical plant traits.

My PhD project aimed at understanding how plants in the flowering stage balance investments between defence and reproduction. I explored changes in phytohormones, and foliar and floral metabolites (primary and secondary) of attacked plants over the flowering period. Through a combination of greenhouse and field experiments, I tested how attacks impacted the plant’s interactions with its mutualists (pollinators, natural enemies), its antagonists (herbivorous insects and bacteria), and plant’s fitness parameters. I finally linked these ecological consequences of attack with the physio-chemical changes measured in the plant. This was a collaborative project between the Laboratory of Entomology, Wageningen University and Research centre (WUR) in Wageningen, The Netherlands, and at the Insect Biology Research Institute (IRBI), University François-Rabelais in Tours, France.

My first postdoctoral project then took plant defences into a broader evolutionary perspective by investigating geographical patterns in defence strategies of plants in the seedling stage. I aimed at determining whether patterns of variation in seedling resistance and tolerance corroborate established biogeographic theories about latitudinal and altitudinal variation in plant defence. I used untargeted metabolomics techniques, and correlated population- and regional-level variation in the plant metabolome to indexes measuring plant palatability, acceptability to herbivores, and tolerance to attack. This was a collaborative project between the group of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Plymouth (UoP), United-Kingdom, and the group of Molecular Interaction Ecology at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Leipzig, Germany.