The Morton Arboretum
Lisle, Illinois, United States
Silvia Alvarez-Clare is a Tree Conservation Ecologist at The Morton Arboretum in Illinois, USA. Her work focuses on using long-term monitoring, manipulative experiments, and conservation-driven research to understand how environmental factors, such as changes in climate, soil nutrients, or land-use affect plant communities, mainly in tropical biodiversity hotspots. Alvarez-Clare was born in Costa Rica, where she obtained a B.S. in Biology from Universidad de Costa Rica in San José. She then earned an M.S. in Botany and a Ph.D in Interdisciplinary Ecology from the University of Florida (UF), Gainesville. For her PhD work she established a long-term fertilization experiment in the Costa Rican rainforest to explore how changes in soil nutrient availability can influence ecosystem processes and the experiment is still ongoing today. She continued this work as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Montana and Argonne National Laboratory studying how greenhouse gas emissions from the forest floor can also change with nutrient additions. Alvarez-Clare is a collaborator of the Global Trees Campaign and a member of the IUCN/SSC Global Trees Specialist Group. In addition to her research and conservation work, Alvarez-Clare is also the co-PI for the Morton Arboretum’s REU Program: Integrative Tree Science in the Anthropocene. She is also passionate about increasing participation of under-represented communities in STEM careers and an avid supporter of Women in Science.
Wednesday, August 9, 2023
4:30 PM – 4:45 PM PDT