Pedro Martins da Silva

Project

Soil fauna Metacommunities: Effect of habitat fragmentation on community dynamics

I’m studying the relative influence of spatial (stochastic) vs. environmental (deterministic) processes in structuring local communities of soil fauna along a gradient of habitat fragmentation.
What is the importance of ecological processes at a range of spatial scales, from the plot to the landscape level, is also a question that has been tackled across organisms with a gradient of body size and dispersal ability, from below-ground fauna to above-ground organisms.
The ultimate aim of my project is to find out whether and how soil fauna communities behave like metacommunities and which metacommunity models could better explain diversity patterns of soil fauna within landscape mosaics.

PhD Grant supported by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia), Portugal.