Supervisor: Prof Rob Salguero-Gómez
I am passionate about how and why individuals and species allocate resources between growth and reproduction. What drives the diversity of life-history strategies within and among habitats? Are there predictable patterns in how this diversity changes across environments, and can we explain why certain strategies become dominant in particular ecological contexts? Classical theory predicts that ecological disturbance, i.e., conditions that generate low population density through local extinction, migration or colonisation, favours both uniparental reproduction, which ensures reproduction under low mate availability (Baker’s Law), and ruderal life-history strategies characterised by rapid growth and high reproductive output that enhance the exploration and exploitation of newly available habitats at the expense of other competitive traits, such as larger size and longer lifespan (the competition–colonisation trade-off; e.g. Grime’s CSR framework, r/K theory, fast–slow continuum). Despite strong theoretical foundations and extensive experimental and focal-species group studies, there is currently no broad, quantitative, and comparative test of how mating systems and life-history strategies jointly respond to ecological disturbance across taxa and regions. My postdoctoral research seeks to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that generate, maintain, and shape the distribution of reproductive and life-history strategies in nature.
I am also deeply interested in the remarkable diversity of sexual systems in plants. Although most flowering plants are hermaphroditic, many species exhibit different combinations of males, females, and hermaphrodites. My PhD work focused on one of the least understood of these systems: the coexistence of all three sexual phenotypes. I investigated how such systems are shaped by both genetic mechanisms of sex determination, including nuclear and cytoplasmic genes, and ecological processes such as mate limitation, local extinction, and migration. These studies laid the groundwork for and inspired my postdoctoral research on the global relationships among disturbance, life-history strategies, and mating systems.
