Jordi Martínez Vilalta is Senior Lecturer (Professor Agregat) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and researcher at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF). He graduated in Environmental Sciences at UAB in 1997 and obtained his PhD (2001) at the same university. He moved to the University of Edinburgh (UK) as a postdoctoral researcher and became an Honorary Research Fellow at this university in 2005. He has coauthored more than 100 publications in peer reviewed international journals and two books (‘Ecología con números’ (2006), a textbook; and ‘Un planeta a la deriva’ (2011), a popular science book). He obtained a favorable assessment from the Program I3 (Spanish Ministry of Science and Education) in 2009 and received an ICREA Academia in 2014.

Research interests

His main area of research is forest functional ecology, at the interface between biology and Earth sciences. His work combines different approaches (observational, experimental, modelling) and scales (from individual organisms to global) to study forest function and dynamics in response to drought and other environmental stress factors. In particular, his current research aims at (1) understanding fundamental aspects of the water and carbon economy of plants; and (2) producing a set of usable criteria to determine what forests are more vulnerable under different climate change scenarios and how the ecosystem services they provide to society are likely to be impacted.

Keywords

Drought, forest ecology, functional traits, global change, long-distance transport in plants