I am a computational ecologist and biogeographer working at the intersection between ecology, biogeography, statistics and data science.
My main research lines focus on (i) understanding and forecasting changes in the distribution and abundance of organisms (particularly plants) in contexts of environmental/climatic change; (ii) forest dynamics, with a particular focus on the role of microclimates, dispersal and regeneration processes; (iii) the ecology and biogeography of seed dispersal mutualisms between plants and animals; and (iv) developing new quantitative methods and software tools to facilitate reproducible research in ecology and biogeography and promote adaptation to ongoing climate change.
My research spans multiple hierarchical scales: from ecological (years, decades) to geological (million years), from field plots to entire continents, and from individuals to populations, species and communities. It often involves coupling field observations with computational approaches based on big datasets, complex statistical models, and reproducible workflows.
I also teach several statistics and programming courses every year. I am fond of incorporating state-of-the-art data science techniques to deliver top-quality reproducible research. I am founding member and coordinator of the ‘R Users Group’ in Sevilla and the Ecoinformatics working group of the Spanish Terrestrial Ecology Association (AEET), which aims to foster good statistical and programming practice among ecologists.
I lead the Computational Ecology & Global Change group ( MAYBE_lab) at the Department of Plant Biology and Ecology at University of Sevilla (Spain). Please check our website to meet the team and learn more about our work and philosophy.
PhD in Ecology, 2010
Universidad de Sevilla
MSc in Ecology, 2005
Universidad de Sevilla
BSc in Biology, 2001
Universidad de Sevilla
Inferring the structure of bipartite (e.g. pollination, frugivory, or herbivory) networks from field (observational) data is a challenging task. Interaction data are hard to collect and require typically large sampling efforts, particularly to characterize infrequent interactions.
La sombra es un recurso escaso y muy necesario en la mayoría de ciudades y municipios. Este año -el más calido registrado hasta ahora- se estiman casi 5.000 muertes asociadas al calor en España.
I have just come back from a wonderful meeting of the Spanish Terrestrial Ecology Association ( AEET) where I received a prize for contributing towards a more open and reproducible science.
UPDATE 26 October 2022: There is now a DHARMa.helpers package that facilitates checking Bayesian brms models with DHARMa. Check it out! The R package DHARMa is incredibly useful to check many different kinds of statistical models.
Quite often we want to extract climatic or environmental data from large global raster files. The traditional workflow requires downloading the rasters (quite often many GB) and then performing data extraction in your local computer.
I created my former website (https://sites.google.com/site/rodriguezsanchezf/) in late 2010, when I was starting my first postdoc at the lovely University of Cambridge. After 10 years, it was about time to revamp it!