Dr Maria Dornelas

Postdoctoral Fellow

Maria Dornelas

 


ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University

Research Interests
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Research Interests

My research interests include community ecology, macroecology and biogeography. I'm interested in understanding the processes that shape biodiversity patterns and determine the structure of ecological communities. I believe understanding how different ecological processes affect these patterns is really important for the sustainable management and conservation of natural systems. I usually study coral communities, but I have also worked with mangrove crabs, plants and tropical freshwater fish, for example. I like to combine ecological theory with fieldwork in my research, and one of my main research goals is to develop powerful empirical tests of ecological models. I am particularly interested in species abundance distributions (SADs), which summarize the patterns of species relative abundances in a community. I am also interested in occupancy distributions, community similarities, range distributions and other macroecological patterns. Having worked with neutral theory of biodiversity, which assumes species differences are irrelevant for community structure, I am now interested in quantifying species differences and their distributions in ecological communities. Future research directions include examining patterns of morphological diversity in reef coral communities, linking morphological, taxonomic and functional diversity, and quantifying life history distributions in reef coral communities

 

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