Landscape Architecture, Harvard University
David, an Assistant Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, studies recovery of ecosystems degraded by human development. He is interested in estimating how long it takes for ecosystems to recover their less resilient attributes, like the interactions among soil organisms and plants. Understanding this will allow for the discovery of tools to increase the currently limited performance of ecosystem restoration and increase our ecological understanding of landscape architecture. To do so, he investigates how the structure of species interactions and the deriving functionality of recovering ecosystems re-assemble over the long term. He works on areas degraded by human activities, agricultural fields and mines, abandoned centuries ago. With this approach, restored and designed ecosystems will be able to reach high levels of functionality, resilience, and adaptability to ongoing global changes. He received his PhD from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Alcala (Madrid) with honors in 2008. After this, he spent three years at the University of California at Berkeley, two at Stanford University, one at the Centre National de la Recherché Scientific (CNRS) in Montpellier, France, and five at the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) in Bilbao, Spain. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Ecology and Ecological Restoration.
Wednesday, August 4, 2021
ON DEMAND