Dr. Agustin Vitali received his PhD from the Universidad del Comahue in Patagonia, Argentina. His postdoctoral research will take place at the Ecological Complexity lab at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, hosted by Dr. Shai Pilosof.

 

Dr. Vitali’s research interests focus on ecological interactions and invasion ecology. During his BSc at the Universidad de Rosario in Argentina, he studied how positive and negative interactions (pollination and herbivory) affect the reproductive output of crops. During his PhD, using a combination of field observations with state-of-the-art methods and theory from network science and ecology, he studied how plant-pollinator-seed disperser network structure and dynamics change in response to invasive species. His research showed that invasive species have the potential to change the structure of the community, altering the dynamics of cascading effects and increasing the propagation of disturbances across the community.

 

In his postdoctoral research, Dr. Vitali is studying the global variation in the direct and indirect impacts of invasive species on ecosystem services and related social actors. In particular, he is curating a novel and comprehensive database of invasive species, ecosystem services and social actors and apply a multilayer network approach to study their association at increasing spatial scales.