Juan Ignacio Ramirez Chiriboga
Postdoc researcher
Job description
Quantify how different grazing regimes by large herbivores shift Arctic food webs and biodiversity across different spatial and temporal scales.
Research interests
My research aim is to understand both how consumers respond to resources and how resources respond to consumers, with wild ungulates as the central part of the equation and across different biomes: Arctic, Boreal, Temperate and Tropical. I implement a wide set of methods to uncover the driving mechanisms of ecological communities, including camera traps, artificial predator cues, vegetation plots, invertebrate traps, litter bags and biodiversity indexes.
Teaching
I coordinated and taught the "Forest and Herbivory" course between 2016-2019 and was invited to give lectures for the "Advanced Forest Ecology and Management" and the "Resource Dynamics and Sustainable Utilization" courses between 2016-2020, all courses from Wageningen University and Research.
I have supervised 1 PhD candidate and 10 MSc. students with their thesis from Wageningen University and Research between 2017-2024, all related to herbivore-plant interactions in Arctic, Boreal, Temperate and Tropical ecosystems.
CV
Background
I have a double BSc. in Applied Ecology and Biology from Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador, 2006-2010), for which I followed specialist courses in ecology at The University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia, 2009). During this time, I quantified the behavioral responses of woolly monkeys to human presence in the Amazon rainforest. I obtained my MSc. in Biology (2013-2015) and PhD in Ecology (2015-2019) from Wageningen University and Research (The Netherlands). My research focused on understanding how wild ungulates shape the structure, composition and succession of temperate forests. Shortly after my PhD, I landed a short postdoc position at Wageningen University and Research and in 2020, I did a 2.5-year postdoc at Umeå University (Sweden). My research focused on the potential of large herbivores to shape the composition and diversity of Arctic ecosystems and prevent the expansion of the treeline. In 2023, worked as a researcher at The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden - SLU) to implement artificial predator cues to drive deer away from areas prone to human-wildlife conflict. Currently, I am a postdoc researcher at The Arctic University of Norway.