I am a Brazilian ecology student deeply interested in 'how' richness is maintained in plant communities. I have been working with tropical forests, mainly the Atlantic rainforest, and I want to understand the main drivers and the mechanistic work that generates coexistence in highly diverse forests. I am interested in questions such as i) How biotic and abiotic factors interact to promote species coexistence through stabilizing and equalizing mechanisms? Specifically, I am interested in exploring plant-enemy interactions and conspecific negative density dependence; ii) What causes tree death and what mechanisms are important when gaps are created?; iii) How phylogenetic relatedness, large-scale processes, and evolutionary history have affected community assembly? Besides that, I am deeply interested in iv) using this knowledge to make predictions about the future of tropical forests and in v) keeping the recent knowledge about tropical forests synthesized and organized. Moreover, I am interested in teaching and outreach activities related to science.

Currently, I am conducting my master’s research, studying large-scale processes and exploring the potential effects of species pools and lineage representation (i.e., how many species per lineage occur in a certain community) on plant communities assembly in the Brazilian Atlantic rainforest.

Here is one of my past projects (undergraduate thesis) that I presented as a poster at the ATBC 2022 (Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation conference, Colombia). I was working with seed and seedling data from a tropical forest, seeking to understand how seed size influenced competition and how it could affect the seedling community.