People

Trainers

Miguel Alvarez

Data scientist and trainer at Fraunhofer FIT, Germany. Long term experience as vegetation ecologist doing field research in Eastern Africa and South America. Main topics of research are wetlands ecology, biological invasions, syntaxonomic classifications and vegetation-plot databases.

Marius Bottin

Independent researcher based in Bogotá, Colombia. Data scientist and ecologist working on biodiversity patterns mainly in highland tropical ecosystems. Currently working on data management and analysis of large multi-taxon data sets. Chair of the “Latin-America and the Caribbean” section of the International Association for Vegetation Science.

João Pedro Costa Elias

Ecologist and data scientist based in Brazil, MSc. in Environmental Science. Currently working with a database of Neotropical plant species (EpIG-DB) as part of a PhD thesis, investigating climate and anthropic factors explaining the actual patterns of biodiversity.

Coordination

Glenda Mendieta

I am ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at Philipps Marburg University, Germany. I use vascular epiphytes to understand Neotropical diversity and aid in regional conservation prioritisation. I am part of the steering committees for the ecoinformatics and LAC sections at the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS).

Gabriella Damasceno

Applied ecologist with training in the management of tropical savannas as both, pristine and degraded ecosystems. Currently coordinating the database sPlot and exploring how big data could help ecologists to answer applied questions about the conservation, management and restoration of plant communities.