Jay P. Sah, Ph.D. — Assistant Director.

E-mail: sahj@fiu.edu

Michael S. Ross, Ph.D. — Director.

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

Lawrence Lopez, M.S. — Research Associate.

Lawrence was originally raised in Peru, in western South America. His first formal contact with nature happened 19 years ago when he worked for researchers studying the ecology of tropical rainforests in southeastern Peru. From there on, Lawrence has been interested in learning the overall workings of nature in tropical and subtropical forests of the Americas. Lawrence earned his Master’s Degree at FIU working on the dynamics of seed predation and seedling herbivory on islands where no top-predators exist (click for selected publications). While in FIU, Lawrence had the opportunity to learn much about the ecology of South Florida and he now joins Ross’ group to collaborate on the study of tropical forests on tree islands in Everglades National Park. Lawrence is very fond of nature and likes to be in the field “calibrating” observations. He has traveled to many unique areas of the Americas and plans to travel even more for more biogeographical enrichment.

E-mail: pipra@yahoo.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.

Nate Colbert, M.S. — Research Associate.

Nate has recently completed his coursework for his master's degree, at Antioch New England University's environmental studies program in conservation biology.  His master's project work entailed an ecological assessment of vernal pool breeding amphibian habitats, and documenting a developer's efforts to incorporate those habitats within a conservation subdivision.  Nate has generalized interests, ranging from learning 'new types' of spatial analyses, plant adaptations and community ecology, to large mammal restoration.  He grew up in the New England area, and just recently moved to Southern Florida to work in the SOFTELab.   He is interested in learning more about past disturbance factors that contributed to changes in plant community succession in the South Florida landscape.  He is enthusiastic about the Lab's research based restoration work and hopes to gain considerable experience, while benefiting the team with his own learned experience and skills.

E-mail: ncolbert33@gmail.com