Contact info

Email: l.markesteijn@bangor.ac.uk

Tel: 01248 382337 (from U.K.)
+44 1248 382337 (International)

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Tropical forest ecology, Functional ecology, Restoration ecology, Plant-enemy interactions 


As a researcher I am foremost fascinated by biodiversity and as such most of my work is carried out in biologically complex tropical forest ecosystems. My research addresses processes underlying function and co-existence of tropical plants and mechanisms of biodiversity generation and maintenance. I take a special interest in density-dependent mortality or negative density dependence (NDD), as mediated by plant natural enemies, and how it affects regeneration dynamics of tropical plants. I further work on physiological plant responses to limiting resources, resource competition, and tolerance to environmental and global change - principally with respect to water and light. I explore the effects of variation in plant functional traits on individual plant performance and species distribution from local to cross-ecosystem scales.

In addition to being a Senior Lecturer in Forest Scsience at the School of Environmental & Natural Sciences, I am an Associate Professor in Ecology at the Area of Biodiversity and Conservation, Global Change Research Institute (IICG-URJC)  at the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid (Spain), and an affiliated researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.

I hold a Ph.D. in Tropical Forest Ecology and an M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Tropical Land Use from Wageningen University (the Netherlands). I worked as a postdoctoral researcher on different projects with STRI and the Universities of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), Oxford (UK), Yale (USA), Oregon State (USA) and Bayreuth (Germany).