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Projects - prof.dr.ir. L (Lourens) Poorter

Projects by L Poorter

ForeFront. The WU-funded ForeFront project is an interdisciplinary research and collaboration project on agriculture-forest frontiers in Latin America. The aim is to get a better understanding of socio-ecological systems in order to design sustainable multifunctional landscapes that provide multiple services to the lcoal people. We want to do so by making biodiversity work, through biological intensification. The reserach is carried out with partners from Mexcio (UNAM), Argentine (IMBIV) and Brazil (Vicosa). 

ROBIN. I am the WU coordinator of the EU-funded ROBIN project on the Role of BIodiversity in climate change mitigatioN in Latin America. Together with research partners from Europe and Latin America we evalute to what extent forest biodiversity may contribute to carbon uptake and storage, and ecoystem services. We do  fieldwork to establish the emperical relationship, use remote sensing to scale up, and models to model into the future what may happen with future climate change.

DIVERSUS. The IAI-funded DiverSus project looks at Diversity and Sustainability in human-modified tropical landscapes in Latin America. We evaluate how biodiversity and ecosystem processes and services change along a gradient of land-use intensification (ranging from undisturbed forest, logged forest, secondary forest, agricultural field and cattle ranching) .

ReSerBoS. The ConaCyt-funded ReserBoS project evaluates how ecosystem processes and services  recover during secondary forest succession after land abandonment in dry and wet regions in Mexico.

LOG-LIFE. The log-life project is a bottum-up initiative between researchers from VU, UU and WUR. The aim is to understand how environmental factors and tree functional traits control stem decomposition of a large suite of tree species. To do so, we have established common-garden decomposition experiments with 20+ temperate species at the fertile Flevo polder and the nutirent-poor Veluwe area.

 

I am currently supervising the following PhD students:

  • Estela Quintero-Vallejo (Legacies of Amazonian Dark Earths of forest structure, composition and dynamics)
  • Masha van der Sande (Effects of disturbance, soils and (functional) diversity on the productivity of tropical forests)