Lars Markesteijn

Lars Markesteijn is an Associate Professor of Ecology at the Area of Biodiversity and Conservation, University Rey Juan Carlos, a Senior Lecturer of Forest Sciences at the School of Environmental and Natural Sciences, Bangor University (United Kingdom) and an affiliated researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.

Lars holds a Ph.D. in Tropical Forest Ecology and an M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Tropical Land Use from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher on different projects with STRI and the Universities of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), Oxford (UK), Yale (USA), Oregon State (USA) and Bayreuth (Germany).

His research interests are broad, but mainly cover tropical forest ecology, functional ecology, restoration ecology, and interactions between plants and their natural enemies. Lars is fascinated by biological diversity and consequently, most of his work is carried out in biologically complex tropical ecosystems, where he addresses the processes underlying the function and coexistence of tropical plants and mechanisms of the generation and maintenance of biodiversity.