Advyth Ramachandran

I am a PhD student in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado–Boulder (CU), working with Dr. Katharine Suding.

I completed my Bachelor of Science in Biology at the University of California–Riverside (UCR) in 2023. At UCR, I worked with Dr. Marko Spasojevic studying plant community assembly in forest and coastal sage scrub ecosystems. At CU, I am interested in studying plant community and ecosystem ecology in grasslands.

Contact

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Earth/Environmental Data Science Portfolio

At CU, I am taking the Earth Analytics Bootcamp course. I am excited to learn about open and reproducible science, automating workflows using Python, and effective project management and digital collaboration. Using Earth Data Science, I hope to understand the structure and diversity of urban forests from remote sensing data.

• Seattle temperature analysis
• Coyote River, San Jose flooding analysis

Research Interests

• community assembly
• ecosystem functioning
• fire ecology
• forest, grassland, and shrubland systems

Projects

Understanding tree seedling recruitment

At the Spasojevic Lab, I studied tree seedling recruitment at a forest dynamics plot in the San Jacinto Mountains of Southern California, USA. We surveyed 256 seedling plots for 2 years to assess growth and survival rates and the lab will continue to monitor seedling demography at this site in upcoming years.

See our publication in Journal of Ecology here.

Assessing the efficacy of thatch removal as a restoration tool in California coastal sage scrub

In California, where invasion of exotic annual grasses is widespread, multiple studies have found that litter accumulation is the primary mechanism by which exotic grasses reduce the performance of native forb species. This suggests that litter removal could be a powerful restoration tool; however, few studies have examined the effects of litter removal on community-level patterns of biodiversity. Litter removal could shift community structure by either allowing native species once inhibited by litter to establish or by increasing the abundance of native species already co-occurring with exotic annual grasses. Alternatively, litter removal could cause no change in native species abundance but instead could increase the abundance of exotic forbs. In a heavily invaded Southern California coastal sage scrub system, we asked: What is the effect of litter removal on species composition, overall species diversity, and native species diversity?