Dr. Maria Elizabeth Rodriguez Ronderos

Academic Qualifications

Ph.D. Biology, National University of Singapore (Singapore)

M.Sc. Biology, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (USA)

Sc. Biology, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (Colombia)

Research areas

Tropical forest dynamics, tropical community ecology, successional secondary forests, carbon and biomass assessments, remote sensing

Research interests

Using field measurements and remote sensing to assess changes in the structure, carbon storage, and biomass accumulation of tropical forests, including changes due to climate change, anthropogenic disturbance and increased liana abundance.

Biography

Elizabeth is a tropical plant community ecologist with expertise in forest dynamics. She holds a Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore, where she was granted one of the six four-year Ph.D. scholarships offered by Yale-NUS College. She worked with Dr. Michiel van Breugel, and focused her dissertation on understanding plant community assembly from the landscape- and local-scale perspectives in abandoned pastures and agricultural fields of Panama. Her research centres on one of the largest and longest tropical forrar chronosequence sites in the world, Agua Salud.

Elizabeth also holds an M.Sc. from the University of Wisconsin, where she worked with Dr. Stefan Schnitzer investigating the effects of lianas in tropical forest tree structure and biomass. She has field experience in early successional, secondary, and old-growth Neotropical forests (Panama and Colombian Amazon). She has also worked in the old-growth tropical forests of Danum Valley (East Malaysia), where she collaborated on liana and tree surveys.

Selected publications:

• Waite C. E., van der Heijden G. M. F., Field  R., Burslem D. F. R. P., Dalling J. W., Nilus R., Rodríguez-Ronderos M. E., Marshall, A. R., Boyd D. S. 2022. Landscape-scale drivers of liana load across a Southeast Asian Forest canopy differ to the Neotropics. Journal of Ecology 111(1): 77-89
• Chisholm R. A., Rodríguez-Ronderos M. E., Feng L. 2021. Estimating Tree Diameters from an Autonomous Below-Canopy UAV with Mounted LiDAR. Remote Sensing 13(13):2576
• Rodríguez-Ronderos M. E., Bohrer G., Sánchez-Azofeifa A., Powers J. P.,Schnitzer S. A. 2016. Contribution of lianas to plant area index and canopy structure in a Panamanian forest. Ecology, 97(12):3271-327.

Conference and presentations:

February 2023: Research Presentation – Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).  Tupper Seminar.  “Forest succession in Agua Salud from the local and landscape and perspectives” Panamá. https://stri.si.edu/events

July 2019: Research presentation – International Congress for Conservation Biology –(ICCB). “What can seed dry weight tell us during succession?”.  Ecology – Speed Talks. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

February 2019: NTU-NUS Ecology & Conservation Plenary Session “What can seed dry weight tell us about succession?” Kent Ridge Campus, NUS, Singapore.