Jordi Martínez Vilalta is professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and researcher at CREAF. He graduated in Environmental Sciences at UAB in 1997 and obtained his PhD (2001) at the same university. He then moved to the University of Edinburgh (UK) as a postdoctoral researcher and became an Honorary Research Fellow at this university in 2005, when he took a lecturer position at UAB. He has supervised 11 PhD theses, has published more than 150 scientific publications, most of them in international peer-reviewed journals, and has coauthored two books (‘Ecología con números’ (2006), a textbook; and ‘Un planeta a la deriva’ (2011), a popular science book). He is considered ‘highly cited’ in plant and animal sciences since 2018 (Clarivate Analytics), and obtained ICREA Academia awards in 2014 and 2020.

Research interests

His main area of research is forest functional ecology, at the interface between plant biology and Earth sciences. His work combines different scales and approaches (observational, experimental, modelling, big data approaches using large datasets) to understand how forests function and how they, and the ecosystem services they provide, are affected by environmental changes. In particular, his current research focuses on (1) understanding fundamental aspects of the water and carbon economy of plants, with a focus on long-distance water transport; (2) characterizing how plant functional traits vary and coordinate in space and time and how they can be integrated to define synthetic axes of plant resource use; and (3) improving our capacity to predict how warmer and drier climates will change forest function and dynamics.

Keywords

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