Overview
I am an ecologist broadly interested in community ecology, especially in linking general theory to empirical research. In most of my research I have used fungi as the main study system, but I have also worked on communities of other taxonomical groups such as insects, birds, plants and bacteria. While my research mostly focuses on understanding how ecological communities are structured across temporal, spatial and environmental gradients, an important part of my research is devoted to resolving methodological challenges that come along with data on ecological communities. In particular, I am interested in developing empirical methods for efficiently acquiring community data and statistical methods for efficiently analyzing such data.
Biography
I earned my PhD in 2014 from the University of the Basque Country, where my research focused on the impact of human-induced environmental changes on wood-inhabiting fungal diversity and assembly processes across various spatial scales. My work explored the relationship between these processes, functional traits, and interaction networks. Following my PhD, I undertook a postdoctoral position at the Centre of Biodiversity Dynamics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2015-2016). During this period, I contributed to the development of statistical methods, particularly joint species distribution models, which enable community ecologists to link theoretical concepts with empirical data. In 2017, I was awarded a postdoctoral project by the Academy of Finland to continue my research at the University of Helsinki. My project aimed to understand how interspecific interactions change and shape community structure under environmentally stressful conditions, using root-associated fungi as a model system. In September 2021, I received an Academy Research Fellowship at the University of Jyväskylä, where I currently serve as an Associate Professor in community ecology. My research is dedicated to unraveling how ecological and evolutionary processes generate variation in species-rich communities. I am particularly interested in investigating the scale dependency of assembly processes, assessing the interactions among these processes, and developing experimental and statistical methodologies to evaluate the roles of assembly processes from empirical data on species-rich communities.
Nerea Abrego 
