María Natalia Umaña

Fields of study
Tropical ecology, functional trait ecology, plant community ecology

Research interests
An outstanding question in ecology is how species coexist by using a limited handful of common resources (light, water, and soil nutrients). Answering this question is particularly challenging in tropical forests, which have apparently a disproportionate number of species given the relatively narrow range of conditions and the long-term stability of these. My approach to this issue consists of studying the ecological mechanisms that drive community structure and dynamics in these species-rich ecosystems. To this end, I integrate performance information with species and individual-level trait data, which inform about the interactions between organisms and their environment. Currently, most of my research is based on tropical forests from Asia and the Americas, where I collect the empirical data and further analyze using a variety of statistical and modeling approaches.