Liza Comita

I am broadly interested in the mechanisms driving patterns of diversity, dynamics, and species distributions in both pristine and human-altered systems. My current research focuses on the ecology of tropical tree species and how spatial and temporal variation in regeneration dynamics act to maintain diversity and determine species abundance and composition within and across plant communities. My research combines extensive field studies of forest dynamics with cutting-edge statistical techniques, such as maximum likelihood methods, spatially-explicit neighborhood analysis, and hierarchical Bayesian models, to produce novel insights into the processes driving regeneration and structuring diverse ecological communities.