Natalia Norden
Phone: +1-860-486-7955
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
75 North Eagleville Road
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT
The regeneration phase is considered to be a critical phase through plant ontogeny since it is a bottleneck for successful species establishment. This research program focuses on identifying the ecological mechanisms that drive seedling regeneration patterns (e.g., niche differentiation, dispersal limitation) in a pristine forest at the Nouragues Station in French Guiana . I am following seedling cohorts into the future to elucidate the importance of temporal variation in recruitment pulses to long-term fluctuations is community composition.
I am most interested in understanding the different forces determining the structure and diversity of species-rich plant communities. Currently, I am a post-doctoral associate in the Chazdon lab, at the University of Connecticut. My research focuses on successional pathways in neotropical secondary forests. My dissertation project was carried out in a pristine tropical forest of French Guiana, where I established a Regeneration Monitoring System in order to elucidate the importance of the regeneration phase in species coexistence.
Successional pathways and rates of change in tropical forests of Brazil, Costa Rica and Mexico
Seeding Regeneration Monitoring at the Nouragues Biological Station, French Guiana
Across the tropics, regenerating secondary forests contribute to as much as 50% of the total forest cover in many countries. We therefore urgently need to understand the ecological drivers and principles of tropical secondary forest regeneration. This project is a collaborative investigation on successional pathways based on long-term dynamic data in tree plots in three neotropical regions. The main objective is to test whether temporal changes in community structure parallels chronosequences in secondary succession.
Photo credit: Jerome Chave
