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José Raventos Bonvehi

Seedling emergence and survival in Mediterranean fire-prone ecosystems  

Josep is biologist working on Population Ecology at the University of Alicante. His primary interest is on regeneration process after fire and torrential rainfall on the Mediterranean coast. He works on population dynamics on tropical epiphyte orchids and the effect on hurricanes on the spatio-temporal dynamics too. The last 7 years he have been working on dendroecology on a Mediterranean coast.

For more than 20 years he has been working on grass competition with different phenology and architecture in a Neotropical savanna in Venezuela.

I collaborate with Josep in spatial point analysis of seedling emergence and survival in a Mediterranean gorse shrubland. We just finished an article on spatial pattern of seedlings of four dominant species after an experimental fire (De Luis et al. 2008). All species individually showed an aggregated spatial pattern and when testing for pair interactions we found that the clusters of individual species were spatially segregated. Additionally, the clusters of individual species showed an internal spatial structure where seedlings of different cohorts were spatially segregated. These patterns are expected by theoretical models to promote species coexistence. The next step is analysis of survival, based on a 9-year monitoring data of this plot.