ALVARADO Swanni
- Published: 03 November 2017
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Post-doctorant CEFE/CNRS
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Bourse: São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) - Research Internships Abroad (BEPE), São Paulo, Brésil. |
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My research has been conducted mainly in tropical areas (South America and Africa) but also in the Mediterranean environment (Mediterranean Steppe). On these ecosystems, I have strived to understand the effects of disturbances (e.g. fire & grazing) on plant communities and populations, and use this information to propose and evaluate protocols for restoring degraded plant communities. On a theoretical level, I am interested in understanding the different processes that determine the assembly rules of plant communities. My fundamental questions in ecology deal with the role of stochastic, abiotic and biotic filters through which species attempting pass in order to become established in the community.
From my PhD, my research has been focus on fire ecology and vegetation dynamic, working mainly in tropical savannas. I study the role of fire in shaping community composition and ecosystem processes in savanna ecosystems, with a focus on management and restoration of dry ecosystems. My PhD project focused on the problem of bush fire and its impact on the savannas and woodland and afforested vegetation in a newly protected area in the highlands of Madagascar. My research helped understand the adaptability of savanna-woodland systems to the spatial and temporal variation of bush fires. I evaluated fire effects on vegetation by studying major biological processes such as reproductive phenology, germination, seedling resistance and resilience to fire.
During my postdoctoral experience, I started to use a remote sensing approach as a complementary tool of the in situ data collection, to modeling the fire dynamic to characterize and monitor landscape changes, structure, ecosystem processes and recovery in tropical savannas in Brazil. More recently, I am using a range of approaches including modeling, remote sensing, and field sampling, and my current activities and research interests include inter-continental and global comparisons of fire on savanna and their impact in the structure and function on this vegetation type. I’m working towards developing a global theory of drivers of fire in a gradient from dry to wet savannas and a statistical description of fire regimes across continents
My main project is developed at the Brazilian Lab
Ecosystem Dynamics Observatory
Departamento de Geografia - Instituto de Geociências e Ciências Exatas (IGCE)
Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP)
Rio Claro - Sao Paulo – Brazil
Research group web site: http://tscanada.wixsite.com/ecodyn
My Research Gate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Swanni_Alvarado2
My home page: http://swata24.wixsite.com/swanni-alvarado
