Text by Alessandra Fidelis
Welcome to our homepage! LEVeg is a group of curious vegetation scientists, interested in different things, but with one thing in common: the passion for grasslands and savannas.
Our group was created by me, Alessandra Fidelis, when I got my position at the Universidade Estadual Paulista, back in 2011. Since then, different students were part of this group, developing interesting research projects in different parts of Brazil. Nowadays, we are a group of one professor (myself), two post-doc researchers, six Ph.D. candidates, two master students, three undergrad students, one technician, and some curious students. You can find who they are and what they are doing at People.
Most of our research is concentrated in Central (Reserva Natural Serra do Tombador) and Southeastern Brazil (Estação Ecológica de Itirapina and Estação Ecológica de Santa Bárbara). But we have students working with campos rupestres and savannas in the Amazon. We have great fire experiments, established since 2013 in Central Brazil, where we try to understand fire behavior and fire effects on the herbaceous layer (both above and belowground). Because of that, we have been not only sampling the aboveground vegetation and analyzing plant traits but also, digging a lot to understand the mechanisms involved in plant regeneration after fire. Therefore, we have been analyzing both root and bud bank traits in different sites in Brazil, cooperating with researchers from France.
Our group is also investigating techniques to control African invasive grasses in the Cerrado, in cooperation with researchers from Latin America (Chile and Argentina) and the UK. Also, we are trying to understand the mechanisms involved in the fire-related cues for germination with colleagues from Brazil and the UK. As a result, we have built a Cerrado Seed Trait Database with more than 100 species so far.
LEVeg cares for the diversity of people, collaborative work, and fun, a lot of fun during field and lab work.
Find us on twitter @LEVeg_Unesp