Boris Bongalov

Boris Bongalov
boris@bongalov.com
Former member in
Forest Ecology and Conservation Group
Department of Plant Sciences

I work in in the hyperdiverse jungles of Southeast Asia where a single hectare can support hundreds of woody plants, with about a third of them not found in the adjacent hectare. How different ecological mechanisms interact to maintain this inordinate species richness and underpin ecosystem functioning is yet unknown. Field data collection in the tropics is still logistically complicated, limiting the spatial extent of the data ecologists use. However, novel remote sensing approaches enable mapping of biological diversity on scales unimaginable until recently, which provide insights into tropical forest diversity, distribution and function over entire landscapes. 

Publications:
Reconciling the contribution of environmental and stochastic structuring of tropical forest diversity through the lens of imaging spectroscopy
https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13357
Topography shapes the structure, composition and function of tropical forest landscapes
https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12964