Prof. Dr. Almut Arneth
Biological and related sciences , Environment, Biogeochemical cycles, vegetation modelling, climate change
Agriculture, Environment
Natural Resources, Ecology
Phenology, Plant-animal interactions
English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Granada (Spain) in 2008, funded by a competitive FPU fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education. I got 6 publications out of my Ph.D. I then earned an Erasmus-Mundus fellowship to a one-year postdoctoral stay at the University of Aleppo, where I carried out a cooperation research project comparing forest regeneration in Mediterranean ecosystems from SE Spain and N Syria. I moved to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (France) in 2009 where I stayed for 2,5 years (funded by the Caja Madrid Foundation and by the Spanish Ministry of Education). I have then focused on the study of tropical plant phenology and the influence of climate on plant reproduction. As a result of this postdoctoral stay, I published 5 papers. I moved in 2012 to Brazil, where I stayed until 2017 (with a maternity gap of almost one year), funded by several Brazilian institutions (CNPq and the competitive postdoctoral fellowship of the São Paulo Research Council, FAPESP). My research in Brazil focused on climate cues triggering fruit phenology in the Neotropics over broad latitudinal and temporal scales. This stay resulted in 7 publications and 4 more are in a very advanced state of preparation. After a maternity leave of almost 1 year, I was awarded in 2018 a prestigious Marie Curie IF at the Estación Biológica de Doñana-CSIC (Spain) where I currently develop a research project aimed at evaluating how phenological changes in interacting plants and animals affect their dynamics over seasonal and long-term time spans.
I have been a Visiting Researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama for almost 3 months, where I compared phenological patterns of fruit production between Barro Colorado Island (Panama) and Nouragues (French Guiana). I spent 3 months at the University of East Anglia (UK) for collaborating with Carlos A. Peres in the implications of fruiting seasonality for frugivores. I keep active collaborations with colleagues in the USA, UK, France, Brazil, and Spain.
I have authored 18 articles, 1 book chapter, 2 software, and 2 data repositories, including 6 publications in top-tier SCI journals. So far my work accumulates a total of 899 citations in Google Scholar and 534 in Web of Science (h = 15 and 12, respectively). I have delivered 2 invited talks in Brazil and the UK and given 42 seminars and contributions to national and international conferences between 2003-2020. I have been the organiser of 4 international symposia (including the prestigious Theo Murphy meeting of the Royal Society). I have participated in 13 research projects funded through competitive calls, being principal investigator of two of them (funded by the Marie Curie Program and the Brazilian FAPESP). I was also the coordinator of the Phenology Monitoring Programme in Nouragues and the field coordinator of the permanent monitoring of plant phenology in the Brazilian Cerrado of the Phenology Lab led by Dr. Morellato.
I have supervised two Master’s Thesis and I am currently supervising an MSc Student from the University Pablo de Olavide. I have given courses on topics related to Ecology and R programming in Universities in Spain, France, and Brazil. I am an editorial board member of the Biotropica journal and have reviewed ~28 manuscripts for journals including the Journal of Ecology, and Nature Ecology and Evolution Biology
Mendoza, I., Condit, R., Wright, S.J., Caubère, A., Châtelet, P., Hardy, and I., Forget, P.-M., 2018. Inter-annual variability of fruit timing and quantity at Nouragues (French Guiana): insights from hierarchical Bayesian analyses. Biotropica 50, 431-441. DOI: 10.1111/btp.12560
Abernethy, K.A., Bush, E.R., Forget, P.-M., Mendoza, I., Morellato, L.P.C., 2018. Synthesis: Current Issues in Tropical Phenology. Biotropica 50, 477-482. DOI: 10.1111/btp.12558
Mendoza, I., Peres, C. A. and Morellato, L.P.C. 2017. Continental-scale patterns and climatic drivers of fruiting phenology: A quantitative Neotropical review. Global and Planetary Change 148: 227-241. DOI: 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2016.12.001
Morellato, L.P.C., Alberton, B. Alvarado, S., Borges, B., Buisson, E., Camargo, M.G.G. Cancian, L., Carstensen, D.W., Escobar, D., Leite, P., Mendoza, I., Rocha, N.W.B., Soares, N.C., Silva, T.S., Staggemeier, V.G., Streher, A., Vargas, B.C., Peres, C.A. 2016. Linking plant phenology to conservation biology. Biological Conservation 195: 60-72. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2015.12.033
Nyiramana, A.*, Mendoza, I.*, Kaplin, B. A., & Forget, P.-M. 2011. Evidence for Secondary Seed Dispersal by Rodents in a Tropical Montain Forest in Africa. Biotropica, 43 (6): 654-657. DOI: 10.1111/j.1744-7429.2011.00810.x
* the first two authors have contributed equally to the article
Zamora, R., Hódar, J. A., Matías, L. & Mendoza, I. 2010. Positive adjacency effects mediated by seed disperser birds in pine plantations. Ecological Applications, 20 (4) 2010: 1053–1060. DOI: 10.1890/09-0055.1
Mendoza, I., Zamora, R., & Castro, J. 2009. A seeding experiment for testing tree-community recruitment under variable environments: implications for forest regeneration and conservation in Mediterranean habitats. Biological Conservation, 142: 1491-1499. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2009.02.018
Matías, L., Mendoza, I., & Zamora, R. 2009. Consistent pattern of habitat and species selection by post-dispersal seed predators in a Mediterranean mosaic landscape. Plant Ecology, 203: 137-147. DOI: 10.1007/s11258-008-9518-7
Mendoza, I., Gómez-Aparicio, L., Zamora, R., & Matías, L. 2009. Recruitment limitation of forest communities in a degraded Mediterranean landscape. Journal of Vegetation Science, 20: 367-376. DOI: 10.1111/j.1654-1103.2009.05705.x
Gómez-Aparicio, L., Pérez-Ramos, I., Mendoza, I., Matías, L., Quero, J.L., Castro, J.L., Zamora, R., & Marañón, T. 2008. Oak seedling survival and growth along resource gradients in Mediterranean forests: implications for regeneration in current and future environmental scenarios. Oikos, 117: 1683-1699. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0706.2008.16814.x
Climate change and phenology: long-term temporal dynamics of mutualistic ecological networks (TEMPNET)
Funding Agency: Research Executive Agency (European Union)
Institution: Estación Biológica de Doñana (CSIC)
Call: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships
Type of action: Reintegration Panel
Reference: 798269 – TEMPNET – H2020-MSCA-IF-2017
Total costs: 171,121.60 €
Phenology in different scales: from plant individual to ecosystem
Funding Agency: CNPq (Brazilian National Council of Scientific and Technological Development)
Institution: Universidade Estadual Paulista, Rio Claro, Brazil
Phenological responses of woody plants to climate change: a comparative analysis across the Neotropics
Funding Agency: FAPESP (process FAPESP No 2012/21061-0)
Institution: Universidade Estadual Paulista, Rio Claro, Brazil
Total costs: 80,000 €
Spanish Association of Terrestrial Ecology (AEET)
British Ecological Society (BES): Ordinary Membership
Association for Tropical Conservation and Biology (ATBC): Ordinary Membership
Dissemination video about my TEMPNET project “Yo Investigo”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsdZg2P5Gtg
Talk “International day of woman in science” in the public Secondary schools IES Heliópolis and IES Federico Mayor Zaragoza (Seville, Spain). February 2020.
Talk “International day of woman in science” in the public school CEI Marie Curie. February 2019. https://sites.google.com/ceipmariecuriesevilla.com/ceipmariecuriesevilla#h.p_3YeUL2ggvw5-
Divulgation article published in Nature in Focus: “The Annual Frugivoral Plan”. https://www.natureinfocus.in/indian-wildlife-information/the-annual-frugivoral-diet-plan
European Night of Researchers: El Mecano de las Interacciones Ecológicas https://lanochedelosinvestigadores.fundaciondescubre.es/actividades/el-mecano-de-las-interacciones-ecologicas/
Participation in the 7th Fair of Science in Jerez 2019: “The networks of life”. Activity aimed at children and teenagers explaining the interactions between organisms that structure biodiversity. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aiJ3taSODVqWliF2bGTyTT8KTGyXcoW0/view
Mother of two children (born in 2015 and 2017)
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Biological and related sciences , Environment, Biogeochemical cycles, vegetation modelling, climate change
Agriculture, Environment, Humanities, Social and behavioural sciences, Rural development, Environmental studies, Gender, Race and ethnicity studies, Feminist studies, Political ecology, Transdisciplinary science and participatory methodologies
Agriculture, Biological and related sciences , Plant Sciences
Environment, Mathematics and statistics, biogeochemistry, isotope geochemistry, soil science