Sandra Durán
Managing Director
Biology Integration Institute ASCEND, University of Minnesota
Sandra Durán is a broadly trained ecologist with extensive field experience in Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Canada and the USA. She earned her Ph.D from the University of Alberta in Canada, where she evaluated how the diversity of tree species and the abundance of woody vines affect carbon stocks in second- and old-growth tropical forests. Her research focuses on understanding how human-caused disturbances and climate change affect the abundance and distribution of plant communities, and how changes in plant traits impact ecosystem processes and function. Specifically, her work focuses on developing approaches for how functional traits can be used to “scale up” from individual to communities and ecosystems. To address these questions, she takes an integrative approach by incorporating field work, statistical modeling, geographic information systems and remote sensing.
