Antonio Rodríguez olmo

My research interests lay on investigating the effect of disturbance on arthropod community assembly and biodiversity. I am especially interested in the effect that forest disturbance exerts on functional groups important for regulating ecosystem services, like decomposers, pollinators, parasitoids or generalist predators.

At present, my research is focused in assessing the response of Boreal forest ground-dwelling arthropod community (mainly composed by ground and rove beetles, spiders and ants), to forest restoration efforts. The study of epigaeic arthropod communities across a large-scale disturbance gradient allows the
assessment of anthropogenic and natural disturbances on community composition and on species’ traits related with their response to perturbation (response traits).

By analyzing the joint effects of fire severity (prescribed vs. wild fire) and succession (old-growth vs. young forests) at different landscape contexts,  we can assess the success of restoration inititiatives, predicting restoration outcomes on trait distribution and community assembly.

I work in my research in North Sweden and Finland, in collaboration with the Finnish Forest Research Institute (Luke).