Jenny Ordonez Barragan MSc

F: +31 20 598 7123

Introduction

I am Jenny Ordoñez and I come from Ecuador. I started as an agronomist in Ecuador and develop expertise on plant ecology, nutrient cycling and quantitative analysis of cropping and natural systems in The Netherlands. Now I am a PhD student working on the relationships between plant characteristics (plant traits) and indicators of soil nutrient supply in natural communities. Below you can see a brief description of my project.

PhD project: Quantification of plant responses to soil nutrient availability: linking plant traits to soil nutrients.

• Soil nutrient availability is one of the main factors determining the species composition in plant communities. Plant communities are also able to modify directly and indirectly the nutrient status of the soil.  Despite there are general theories describing how plant respond to different nutrient availability regimes no general quantification exists for natural community responses. Such Quantitative knowledge is urgently needed in order to study likely effects of ongoing change on plant communities. 
•  In this project we look for general relationships between plant traits and nutrient availability. The collection of data needed to develop this relationship started in 2005. Data comes from published and unpublished sources containing trait and soil characteristics measured in the same locations. The idea is to collect information that spans a wide range of soil nutrient availability conditions and a wide range of trait values. In this way we can be confident that the relationships generated can be used to model plant response to nutrient supply. 
•  An important characteristic that is evident from the relationships between plant traits and environmental variables is variability. Natural variability is a common property of plan communities. It has been reported that most of the variability in plant traits occurs within plant communities. Factors contributing to variability within communities will be studied with a dataset of plant traits and soil characteristics measured in 52 locations in The Netherlands.

Context

This research is part of BSIK A1 Project: ‘Biodiversity in a changing environment: predicting spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation’. The final aim of this project is to develop a set of models to predict effects of climate change and water management measures on plant species composition in The Netherlands.

Last update June 5, 2007