Mara Baudena

Research interests

With my current research I aim to predict how different terrestrial ecosystems actively respond to global environmental change. I focus mostly on plant ecosystems in drylands, savannas and Mediterranean forests. I am interested in studying the complex ecosystem dynamics emerging from plant-plant and plant-environment interactions, including wildfires and vegetation-climate feedbacks. Physics was my first scientific playground, but I have always been interested in plants, and in environmental and climate issues in general. Therefore, I have an attitude in looking at plant ecosystems with the mechanistic, quantitative eye of the physicist. This leads me to build simplified mechanistic models that help understanding how complex dynamics affect the ecosystems. I also like to extract the signal out of noisy data, which lead me to study large datasets of plants occurrence with network techniques. Besides the curiosity about the plants and (eco)systems I study, in my work I'm also driven by the will of connecting different type of knowledge and people within different fields, from the most quantitative approaches of complex system science to plant field ecology, via climate science and (eco)hydrology, touching also the far realm of economics. I personally experienced that connecting people with different backgrounds is challenging, but it leads most often to very innovative and groundbreaking discoveries.