Antonio J. Perea

Since the beginning of my scientific activity, I keep a profile associated with Ecology and plant-organism interactions. I joined as a trainee student at the Dept. of Plant Biology and Ecology (University of Seville 2011-2015), where I conducted my TFG and TFM in plant-vertebrate interactions, among other related tasks. After that, I worked as a volunteer for the National Trust for Scotland in the United Kingdom, conducting several scientific and technical works such as vertebrates and plant surveys, together with data analyses (2015-2017). Next, I got an FPI-MINECO-2016 to develop my PhD at the University of Jaen (UJA, 2017-2022). During this time, I made two National research stays at EEZ-CSIC and IRNAS-CSIC (2 and 4 months, respectively), and an international one at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ-Idiv, 3 months) This provided a cumlaude thesis with international mention. After PhD, I worked as a technician and postdoctoral researcher in EEZ (2022). Currently, I own a PostDoc fellowship, being the UFZ receptor centre in 2023, and the UJA in 2024. Throughout all this time, I led several manuscripts and co-authored others, most of them with open access in JCR journals, and within the first quartiles of Ecology and Plant Science. Also, all the data relative to these works are uploaded to public repositories, such as DRYAD, TRY-DB and DIGITAL-CSIC, enhancing Open Science. My research consisted of determining the driving mechanisms of interactions between woody plant species, and how they predict the assembly and dynamics of forest communities. Most of the studies dealing with community assembly are based on pairwise plant species interactions. This approach is somehow biased because of it is required to predetermine up to what distance the interaction can be considered, but also because of, from empirical perspectives, plants do not interact exclusively with a partner, but with rich-species neighbourhoods. In fact, the pool of species inhabiting the neighbourhood condition the third organisms of this area, and their interactions with plants. Here, phylogenetically conserved organisms such as mycorrhizas, epyphites and pathogens, are of particular interest since they can interact with phylogenetically close plant species. In this way, the spatial aggregation of these plants constitutes an ideal breeding ground for them, likely driving the dynamics of the forest communities. Nevertheless, this kind of structure, both spatial and phylogenetical, could be less resilient to the apperance of non-native organisms. Therefore, accounting for the neighbourhood of plant species may provide key information to understand processes and dynamics involved in forests communities, but also, would allow to prevent the expansion of exotic plant-diseases in plant communities.