Lars Markesteijn

Background

About Lars Markesteijn

As a researcher and educator, I am foremost fascinated by biological diversity, and as such most of my work is carried out in biologically complex tropical forest ecosystems. My research addresses the processes underlying the function and co-existence of tropical plants and mechanisms of biodiversity generation and maintenance. I take a special interest in density-dependent mortality or negative density dependence (NDD), as mediated by plant natural enemies, and how it affects the regeneration dynamics of tropical plants. I further work on physiological plant responses to limited resources, resource competition, and tolerance to environmental and global change - principally with respect to water and light, and explore the effects of variation in plant functional traits on individual plant performance and species distribution from local to cross-ecosystem scales.