Maria Cuenca-Cambronero

PhD student - Irum Shahzadi

I am Irum, a PhD student enroled on the TRANSPONDER project.

My thesis aims to assess the functional diversity of pond ecosystems and how climatic and anthropogenic factors shape the interaction among the different communities of biodiversity, including zooplankton, macroinvertebrates and macrophytes. By combining newly collected and existing data from ponds across a broad spatial scale (latitudinal and climatic gradients) in Europe, my thesis will evaluate how environmental factors can affect pond ecosystems by altering functional diversity in pond communities.

I develop my thesis on the Aquatic Ecology Group at UVic, under the supervision of Dr. Maria Cuenca and Prof. Sandra Brucet. My three-year thesis is funding by Agaur Agency from the Generalitat of Catalunya.

Aquatic ecology Group (GEA)

I am part of the GEA group, led by Prof. Sandra Brucet at the University of Vic, Catalonia.

The main objective of the GEA group is to study how freshwater ecosystems (particularly lacustrine systems) are impacted by anthropogenic factors such as nutrients, temperature, water scarcity, salinisation, pollutants, etc. We use complementary approaches (experiments, time-series, space-for-time substitution, and theoretical models) and focus on biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, especially in pond ecosystems.