Mart Verwijmeren
Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development - Environmen
Utrecht University
Netherlands
Biography
As a junior lecturer I teach in several courses in the bachelor Global Sustainability Science (Mathematics, Global Climate Change, Regional Integration (fieldwork) project). Also I have been supervising bachelor thesis projects and I am tutoring first year students. In my PhD project I investigated how plant-plant interactions change with increasing environmental stress in a grazed, arid ecosystem in the southeast of Spain. Plants often compete for resources. But in stressful conditions (e.g. drought or heavy grazing), plants may also enhance each other’s growth/survival. This so called facilitation is an important mechanism in upholding ecosystem stability, because shifts from facilitation to competition may result in rapid degradation of arid ecosystems. By gathering observational and experimental data on plant-plant interactions and by combining this with eco-hydrological model studies, I hope to better understand how plant interactions change along mixed gradients of drought stress and grazing stress. This is valuable information to prevent future land degradation in dryland ecosystems or to restore already degraded areas.
Research Interest
plant ecology
Publications
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de Hoop, M., Verwijmeren, M., Wassen, M.J., Garcia Mayor, A., Smit, C. & Rietkerk, M.G. (27.10.2015). Predicting sudden land degradation in response to overgrazing and climate change.
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Verwijmeren, M. (16.12.2016). Interspecific facilitation and critical transitions in arid ecosystems. (159 p.).
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Diaz Sierra, R., Verwijmeren, M., Rietkerk, M.G., Resco de Dios, Victor & Baudena, M. (2017). A new family of standardized and symmetric indices for measuring the intensity and importance of plant neighbour effects. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 8 (5), (pp. 580-591).
