Mr Alexander Elsy

I am a tropical forest ecologist working towards a PhD at the University of Stirling, funded by the IAPETUS DTP. I am interested in forest recovery in late succession, community ecology and liana-tree interactions. My current fieldwork is based on a secondary forest chronosequence in the Barro Colorado Nature Monument, Panama. I have previously worked in degraded secondary forest and oil palm plantations in Sabah, Borneo.

My PhD is primarily focused on secondary succession of tree and liana communities in the Neotropics. My first chapter focuses on a secondary forest regeneration in a chronosequence in Panama and looks at how long the tree communities take to recover. My later chapters look at liana and tree communities at sites across the Neotropics and the interacting factors which affect recovery over successional and climatic gradients.