Brucet, Sandra

Biography

She was born in Girona in 1976. She graduated in 1998 and obtained her PhD in Biology in November 2003 at University of Girona. After that she was a postdoc at the University of Oslo (2006) and the National Environmental Research Institute of Denmark (2006-2008). From 2009 to 2012, she worked as a research scientist at the European Commission-Joint Research Centre (Italy). In 2012, she was hired at University of Vic in order to create a new research group on Aquatic ecology. In 2013, she obtained a Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship to work at the University of Aarhus (Denmark). she has also been a Visiting Scientist at the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. In September 2015 I was appointed ICREA Research professor.

Research Interest

A key focus of her research is the response of aquatic ecosystems and their biodiversity to global changes, particularly the combination of climate change with other anthropogenic stressors. Her research is holistic including the whole trophic structure. She focus on different aquatic ecosystems and she use complementary approaches (experiments, latitudinal comparisons, theoretical ecology). She conducted research evidencing the negative effects of the combined increased temperature, salinity and drought on the food web and biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems. They showed that warming and the associate changes in the top-down control will benefit small organisms across the food web with negative consequences for ecosystem health. They also found that temperature strongly influences most components of fish taxonomic and functional diversity at macroecological scale, emphasizing its importance in determining aquatic biodiversity.