Research Staff

Dr. Ross's general research interests are in the area of environmental controls on plant community composition and structure, the involvement of these controls in the successional process, and the implications of successional development on restoration efforts. His approach often incorporates large-scale field manipulations with pattern analysis based on "natural experiments", usually arrayed along well-defined environmental gradients. His background and expertise is largely in forests of the southern Appalachians, the Lake states, boreal central Alberta, and the tropical Florida Keys. The challenge in developing successional models for such forested ecosystems is to incorporate interactions within and among spatially-variable, size-structured populations. Presently, the majority of his research has been directed toward restoration of the mixture of forested and herbaceous coastal wetlands of mainland south Florida.

E-mail: rossm@fiu.edu

Pablo L. Ruiz — GIS - Remote Sensing Specialist.

Pablo joined the SERC family (then SERP) back in 1994. During those early youthful years, Pablo worked as a Lab Technician analyzing soil samples for the presence of diatom assemblages, which could then be used to quantify the relationship between present and past vegetation patterns in relation to changes in the hydrological conditions of Southeast Florida. Since then, Pablo has logged over a decade of work in the wetlands and short hydroperiods marshes, mangrove swamps, and upland forests of Everglades National Park and Biscayne National Park. He is currently working on a land cover map of Biscayne National Park. His area of expertise and interest lies in vegetation mapping and remote sensing. However, South Florida natural history, fire ecology, paleoecology, restoration ecology, astronomy, epistemology & skepticism, and “other neat stuff” manages to keep Pablo up at night more often then he would like.

E-mail: ruizp@fiu.edu

Susana L. Stoffella, M.S. — Research Associate.

Susana has worked on surveys of temperate and subtropical grasslands in her native country: Argentina. Conscious of the importance of multivariate techniques as tools to analyze vegetation data she has devoted many years of her research life to their study and application. Her research interests also have focused on vegetation-environment relationships and the effect of disturbances on grasslands, specially grazing. On the latter, she has worked on the effect of sheep grazing on the community dominated by a common Patagonian shrub. She is also interested in the link between plant functional traits at the ecophysiological level and community dynamics to better understand vegetation controls on ecosystem processes. She joined the group to analyze data on the effect of fire on the herb layer of South Florida Pine Rocklands but as time passes, she is getting involved in many other activities related to projects conducted by the team.

E-mail: stofell@fiu.edu

Brooke Shamblin — Research Associate.

Brooke worked on a hammock composition project and how it pertains to restoration of Boca Chita Key in Biscayne National Park. This work was done through a 3-year Americorps program (1996-1999). Brooke spent 1998-2006 as a research technician and lab manager studying Everglades fish and macro invertebrate communities, and how they change through time. Brooke joined the Ross group in November of 2006, and has worked as a research technician on all projects, especially the tree island and LILA projects. Brooke’s interests include trying to learn every plant species in Florida and ecological restoration with emphasis on forested communities.

Michael Kline, M.S. — Research Associate.

Michael Kline has been exploring and studying aquatic systems for the better part of 15 years. As an undergraduate, Michael studied marine and estuarine systems, particularly the Chesapeake Bay. He focused his graduate studies on freshwater systems, concentrating in wetlands. He seeks to understand biotic and abiotic wetland interactions in order to conserve and, if necessary mitigate, systems. He has studied rivers in the Rocky Mountains, prairie potholes in Northern Iowa, and is currently hard at work in the Everglades. He plans to begin a doctoral program in Fall of 2008.

E-mail: rshamb66@hotmail.com

Dr. Sah has been a central member of the Terrestrial Ecology Research team since the early months of his doctoral program in 1996, when he became involved as a Graduate Research Assistant. Currently, he is a Post-doctoral Research Associate, and his research focuses on ecosystem processes and their management implications in the seasonal wetlands in Everglades, coastal wetlands of the Southeast Saline Everglades, and the tropical and sub-tropical upland forests of the Miami Rock Ridge and adjacent islands. Dr. Sah’s expertise is in studying vegetation-environment relationships and effects of natural and anthropogenic disturbances on pattern and processes in various types of plant communities, including upland forests and floodplains and other seasonal wetlands. His research approach includes the use of multivariate statistical techniques to interpret relationships among vegetation and environmental variables in large data sets, spatial integration of the analytical results via extensive GIS databases, and system dynamics modeling. He is also involved in inter-disciplinary research on socio-economic issues and conservation in Nepal.

Erin J. Hanan, M.S. — Research Associate.

Erin’s research interests lie in the area of biogeochemical cycling and soil heterogeneity within wetland landscapes. She recently completed her Masters thesis entitled: Multi-Scaled Patterning of Plant-Soil-Water Interactions across Tree Islands and Marshes within the Prairie and Slough Landscapes of Everglades National Park. Erin grew up in San Diego, California and completed her Bachelors degree in Environmental Studies with a minor in Architecture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her undergraduate research experiences were in the areas of Terrestrial Ecology and Isotope Geochemistry. Erin is currently working as a full-time research associate and teaching Ecology of South Florida. She begins to begin a Ph.D. program in Fall 2009, where she would like to continue to study biogeochemical patterns and processes within terrestrial landscapes.

E-mail: erin.hanan@fiu.edu

Danielle Ogurcak — Graduate Student, Research Assistant.

Danielle graduated in 1999 with a Bachelors of Science in natural resources from the Cornell University School of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Most recently she has been employed by the University of Florida as a biologist, doing research in support of Everglades Restoration. Specifically, she has been mapping alligator holes in Everglades National Park and sampling the surrounding vegetation and ground morphology. She is working with Dr. Mike Ross and is planning to study the effects of increased salinity resulting from storm surges and sea level rise on endemic plants in pine rocklands in the Florida Keys.

E-mail: dogurcak@ufl.edu

Jose Espinar, Ph.D. — Post-doctoral Research Associate.

Jose’s research has been focused on (1) factors influencing the distribution, composition, production and diversity of plant communities, (2) nutrient cycles in wetlands, (3) abiotic and biotic factors influencing sexual regeneration of clonal plants in wetlands, (4) seed bank ecology, and (5) dispersion and plant animal interaction. Jose’s background included research in Mediterranean brackish wetlands (Doñana. marshes, Spain), subtropical coastal wetlands (Louisiana marshes) and tropical freshwater wetlands (Florida Everglades). In SERC his work focuses on ecosystem processes and their management implications in the freshwater Everglades, mainly working with data related to plant communities in tree islands ecosystems.

E-mail: espinarj@fiu.edu

Rachel King, Ph.D. — Post-doctoral Research Associate.

Rachel’s work has focused primarily on plant population dynamics and the roles of seed dispersal and successional processes in those dynamics. After finishing her bachelors degree in Biology at the University of Oregon, she worked as a forester in Costa Rica, first with the Peace Corps and then on private tree farms, where she grew to appreciate the importance of seed dispersal by animals (bats, birds, ants, or rodents of unusual size) to maintaining functioning plant populations. Her doctoral research at the University of Miami focused on the roles of seed dispersal by bats and successional processes in population dynamics in Manu National Park, Peru. Rachel is currently looking at the factors contributing to the spread of woody plants into the marl prairies of the Everglades.

E-mail: rachel@bio.miami.edu

E-mail: klinem@fiu.edu