Theoretical and computational
ecology laboratory

David Alonso

Head of group

I am a CSIC Researcher with interests in the interdisciplinary study of ecology and evolution on the basis of the integration of physics, mathematics, biology and computer simulation. Most of my research focuses on the study of the main factors controlling biodiversity and community composition across spatio-temporal scales. Ecological systems are tremendously complex. This realization pervades all my research. In particular, I have studied the spread and emergence of infectious diseases as a consequence of human-induced global environmental change and, more generally, the variety of mechanisms involved in the origins, maintenance and loss of species in ecological communities with particular attention to the role of stochasticity in all these processes.

Interests: Community ecology, population biology, infectious diseases, biodiversity research, climate change, environmental forcing, stochastic birth-death processes, non-linear interactions, self-organization, and complex systems are typical key-words in his publications.