Title:  Impacts of global change and on tropical ecosystem functioning
Speaker: Dr. Imma Oliveras,  IRD (France), ECI (University of Oxford), State University of Mato Grosso

Abstract:
One of the biggest challenges in biosphere science is to understand how ecosystems are responding to global changes, such as climate change, land use change and changes in disturbance regimes. This challenge is particularly acute for tropical ecosystems because of their high biodiversity, importance for global biogeochemical cycles, and still poorly understood ecophysiological functions. This talk will give a brief overview of some of the state-of-art on the impacts of global change on tropical ecosystem energy budgets, biogeochemistry cycles, and ecological function.

Speaker Bio: 
Dr Imma Oliveras is Research Director at the Institute of Recherche pour le Developpement (France), Senior Scientist at the Environmental Change Institute (University of Oxford) and visiting professor at the State University of Mato Grosso. She leads the Disturbance Ecology and Global Change Group, and her main research addresses the vulnerability and resilience of ecosystems to global change. She is interested on how changes in abiotic conditions - particularly extreme droughts and altered fire regimes- affect plant form and function, and how this aggregated to diversity and ecosystem functioning.