Email: l.markesteijn@bangor.ac.uk

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

Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearchGate

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).

PhD candidates:

Dan Fishburn Breaking down the effect of UV light on litter decomposition; a study of carbon cycling along a tropical forest humidity gradient. NERC Envision PhD. 2019 - 2023. (co-supervised with Dr Ana Rey, and Dr Andy Smith)

Teaching:

Module coordinator:

• DXX-2017 Forest Health

Module contributions:

• DXX-3305 Field course: Tenerife
• DXX-3701 Honours Project
• DXX-4999 MSc Dissertation
• DDL-4545 Tropical Forestry Study Tour
• DDL-4999 Distance learning Dissertation

Biography

I obtained my PhD in 2010 at Wageningen University (the Netherlands). In my dissertation, I addressed the functional ecology of tropical tree species, aiming to understand how species’ drought and shade tolerance strategies explain species coexistence and distribution along resource gradients. In early 2010, I was awarded a 2-year Rubicon grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), that I used to collaborate with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama and the Unoiversity of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) to study the role of plant hydraulics in explaining differences in drought performance between liana and tree species. Late in 2011, I moved to Spain where I visited the Ecology and Global Change group at the National Museum of Natural Sciences, Spanish National Research Council (MNCN-CSIC) in Madrid for a year. Early in 2013, I started working on the NERC-funded project, entitled ‘Natural enemies, climate and the maintenance of tropical tree diversity’, at Community Ecology Research Oxford (CERO), University of Oxford, in collaboration with STRI. In this project we set out to test the hypothesis that humidity drives variation in tropical plant diversity through its influence on the interactions between plants and their natural enemies. The 2015-2016 El Niño event, and subsequent funding through a RAPID grant by the United States National Science Foundation (US NSF), provided an unique opportunity for a third postdoc to study the immediate effects of an extreme drought event on the physiological performance and regeneration dynamics of tropical plants along a rainfall gradient. This project resulted from a collaboration between Oregon State, Yale School of Forestry, Bayreuth University and STRI. In 2016, I joined the School of Natural Sciences in 2016 as a Lecturer in Forest Sciences, and a SÊR Cymru MSCA CoFund Research Fellow, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2019. Finally, in 2020, I joined the Area of Biodiversity and Conservation (Biodiversos) and the Global Change Research Institute (IICG-URJC) at the Department of Biology and Geography, Physics and Inorganic Chemistry, University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, as a Distinguished Research Lecturer (Beatriz Galindo Fellow). In 2023, I received became a tenured Associate Professor in Ecology at the same institute.

Qualifications 

2010                PhD Tropical forest ecology Wageningen University, the Netherlands

2005                MSc Tropical land use Wageningen University, the Netherlands