Functional Ecology is delighted to announce 20 new Associate Editors who have joined the Editorial Board following our latest open call across all seven BES journals. Find out more about the expertise behind Functional Ecology’s newly onboarded Associate Editors below!

Associate Editor Profiles

1. Iveren Abiem

Department of Plant Science and Technology, University of Jos, Nigeria

Iversen is a forest ecologist and conservation biologist studying biodiversity in Afromontane forests. I combine quantitative and experimental approaches to examine forest structure, species interactions and their relative contribution to providing ecosystem services. I am involved in participatory conservation, working with local communities to protect and manage biodiversity.

2. Seton Bachle

LI-COR Environmental, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

Seton is a plant ecophysiologist interested in how plants interact with their environment. He mainly focuses on how plant species respond to the impacts of climate change. His research interests include plant-water relations, ecophysiology, plant anatomy, plant functional traits at both the above & belowground level (from cellular to whole tissue), and grassland ecology and subsequent drivers therein.

3. Adrià Barbeta

Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology, and Environmental Sciences, University of Barcelona, Spain

Adrià is an ecophysiologist and ecohydrologist focused on the responses of plants and ecosystems to environmental changes. He specialised in the study of water fluxes along the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum and their response to extreme climatic events such as droughts and heatwaves. His research is mainly conducted at the Mediterranean-temperate ecotone using tools such as stable isotopes, remote sensing, dendrochronology, and forest inventories. 

4. Vinicius Augusto Galvão Bastazini

Mediterranean Institute for Agriculture, Environment and Development, Global Change and Sustainability Institute, Institute for Advanced Studies and Research, University of Évora, Portugal

Vinicius’ main research interest lies in understanding the interplay between ecological and evolutionary dynamics and its consequences to patterns of biological diversity and species interactions. He addresses these sorts of questions by combining theoretical and analytical concepts from ecology, phylogenetics and network science, using species traits as a biological building block to understand eco-evolutionary dynamics and their consequences to ecological communities and ecosystems services.

5. Martin Bouda

Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic

Martin is a plant physiological ecologist who aims to build mechanistic process understanding of hydrodynamic interactions between plants and their environment, which underlie both evolutionary change in plants and ecosystem functioning. He employs numerical modelling, network analysis, and field observations to characterise flows in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum and plant responses to drought. His work examines how network properties of vascular plant tissues or organs mediate hydraulic functioning across scales of organisation of the plant body as well as from the scale of individual plants to larger hydrological units. 

6. Trevor Dube

Geography, Environment and Planning, School of Life and Medical Sciences, University of Hertfordshire, UK

Trevor is a community ecologist with interests in the conservation of aquatic biodiversity and their habitats. I like to use habitats such as ponds, wetlands, and rivers as model systems to test ecological theories using macroinvertebrates as model organisms. I am particularly interested trophic ecology, aquatic monitoring, and how ecological systems respond to an environmental disturbance caused by anthropogenic impacts. Since joining the University of Hertfordshire in 2022, my research has expanded to include the ecology and conservation of terrestrial insects, using eDNA and barcoding. 

7. Marcos Fernández Martínez

Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Marcos is a multidisciplinary ecologist, working on the effect of climate and nutrient availability on global carbon balance, biodiversity, functional traits, ecological stoichiometry and bryophyte ecology. During my career, I have tried to combine all these areas of ecology to go beyond traditional studies. His current main line of research is focused on developing and testing the potential of the elemental diversity concept as a predictor of ecosystem functioning. 

8. Antonella Gori

DAGRI – Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry, University of Florence, Italy

Antonella Gori’s research focuses on understanding how woody plants respond to environmental stresses and climate change. She investigates the physiological and biochemical responses of plants in both natural and controlled conditions, with a particular focus on the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, such as polyphenols and isoprenoids, in response to water and heat stress. Her recent research interests also involve the investigation of tree vulnerability to xylem embolism under water stress.

9. Robin Heinen

Terrestrial Ecology Research Group, TUM School of Life Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Robin is an entomologist and ecologist whose primary interest is understanding how plants interact with their (arthropod) interaction partners. He focuses on how soil communities influence plant-herbivore interactions; how plant chemical diversity shapes arthropod communities; and how global change drivers (e.g., artificial light at night and extreme climatic events) affect such interactions. His research experience has a strong focus on herbaceous plant models, and his research covers climate chamber, greenhouse, and field studies.

10. Florian Hofhansl

Biodiversity, Ecology, and Conservation (BEC) Research Group, Biodiversity and Natural Resources (BNR) Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Schlossplatz 1, A-2361 Laxenburg, Austria

Florian is keen to explore the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning with a particular focus on plant functional traits, life-history theory, and spatial ecology. He has been working at the Tropical Field Station La Gamba, Costa Rica, the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA), Manaus, Brasil, and is currently located at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Laxenburg, Austria.

11. Grace Hoysted

School of Biology and Environmental Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Grace is an environmental biologist with interests spanning many areas which centre around plants and soil biodiversity. She is interested in interkingdom interactions, particularly plant-fungal interactions with other microorganisms in the soil. Grace’s research expertise includes plant-insect-soil pathogen interactions and plant mycology, specifically the physiology, ecology and evolution of mycorrhizal interactions with diverse microbes in both natural and agro-ecosystems.

12. Heng Huang

University of Hong Kong, China

Heng is a plant and ecosystem ecologist with a broad interest in the effects of global change on plant growth and metabolism, ecosystem stability, and terrestrial carbon cycling. His current research uses a combination of theoretical and empirical approaches to investigate (1) the biotic and abiotic controls on carbon-cycle dynamics across scales from the organ to the ecosystem level and (2) regime shifts in ecological systems under global change and the underlying mechanisms.

13.  Michael P. Moore

Department of Integrative Biology, University of Colorado, Denver, USA

Mike is an evolutionary ecologist and eco-physiologist who is interested in the factors that constrain evolution over historical and contemporary timescales. By integrating comparative, experimental, and field approaches, his lab’s research especially focuses on the impact of physiology and ontogeny on patterns of mating and reproduction. His lab mainly uses aquatic insects and amphibians in their studies.

14. Michael Peers

Department of Biology, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

Mike is broadly interested in the ecology of mammals, such as predator-prey interactions, food web dynamics, and the drivers of population cycles. His research interests extend to understanding and predicting how species will respond to climate change and integrating this knowledge into conservation decisions.

15. Amanda Pettersen

The University of Sydney, Australia

Amanda is an evolutionary ecologist interested in understanding processes that maintain phenotypic diversity across the life history. Her work integrates ecology, evolution, and physiology, to investigate the causes and consequences of variation in energy allocation and expenditure, particularly during vulnerable early life stages. She complements field and lab work on ectotherms, with meta-analysis and comparative methods, to explore context-dependent selection and potential mechanisms of adaptation to environmental change.

16. Shyam S. Phartyal

School of Ecology and Environment Studies, Nalanda University, Rajgir, India

Shyam’s research interest revolves around the seed ecology of wild plants growing in diverse habitats, ranging from wetland to woodland ecosystems. More specifically, he studies seed dormancy and germination ecology, seed storage physiology, and other related traits responsible for a plant’s dispersal, persistence, and regeneration. His secondary research interest includes citizen science, forest fire, plant herbivory, and plant phenology using live & herbarium specimens.

17. Pengshuai Shao

Shandong Key Laboratory of Eco-Environmental Science for the Yellow River Delta, Binzhou University, Binzhou, China

Pengshuai is a microbiologist, whose research focuses on ecology, soil, and microbiology. He interests in the role of soil microbes in controlling the turnover and formation of soil organic matter, especially the linkages among plant, soil, and microbial processes in temperate forests and coastal wetlands. His work is now focusing on two ecosystems: the coastal wetlands and saline-alkali land, where salinity and water are the main factors affecting microbial community structure and functions. 

18. Hui Sun

Nanjing Forestry University, Nanjing, China

Hui’s research focus on the roles of microbial community involving in carbon and nitrogen cycling in forest ecosystem. His specific research is related to how the forest disturbance caused by biotic and abiotic factors affect the microbial community of forest tree and soil, how forest tree, microbial community and tree-microbe interaction mediate the forest ecosystem responses to such disturbance.

19. Mayra C. Vidal

Biology Department, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA

Mayra studies the ecology and evolution of species interactions, mainly mutualisms and trophic interactions. Her research is centered on understanding how species interactions change spatially and temporally and how these changes can shape community structure and the evolution of interacting species. Mayra’s current projects include exploring the diet breadth evolution of a generalist insect herbivore and using a synthetic mutualism to investigate mutualism persistence and coevolution. Her work integrates community ecology, molecular ecology, evolution, entomology, and microbiology.

20. Qiang Yang

1. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany
2. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

Qiang is a community ecologist and macroecologist whose research focuses on the patterns and dynamics of ecological interactions (e.g. predator-prey, mutualisms) and biodiversity. His research typically involves the use of modelling and data analysis to understand the factors that limit species ranges and how they interact. He is also interested in the prediction of how ecological networks and biodiversity will respond to drivers of global change.