Hi! We are three enthusiastic PhD-students at NMBU who are doing our research on tropical ecology. Below you will find a little more information about us. Feel free to send us an e-mail if you have any questions.

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Yennie K. Bredin – yennie.bredin@nmbu.no:
In this blog, Yennie will take you to the floodplains of the Amazon and a forest known as Várzea. The Várzea floodplain forests are forests that alternate between a terrestrial and an aquatic phase as the rivers of the Amazon flood the forests in the rainy season and leave the trees under up to over 10 meter of water for half of the year. In her project, Yennie explores the relationship between forest structure and carbon storage in these unique forests to understand how Várzea contribute to the global climate.

From 2012 to 2015 Yennie worked in the Norwegian institute for nature research (NINA). There she explored the interactions between society and nature conservation. Yennie has a BSc and MSc in Ecology and Natural Resource Management with a specialization in tropical ecology from NMBU.

Miguel Muñoz Mazón – miguel.munoz.mazon@nmbu.no:
Miguel has a BSc in Biology, specialization in ecology, from the Universidad Atonoma de Madrid (UAM). During his time at UAM, Miguel got into the world of forest ecology through the study of temperate and Mediterranean ecosystems.

As birds do in summer (at least in the northern hemisphere), Miguel headed north (to the Netherlands) where he took an MSc in Forest and Nature Conservation at Wageningen University. His stay in the Netherlands gave him a chance to work with tropical forests and their peoples for the first time.

Paradoxically Miguel’s thirst for the tropics took him further north, to Norway, where he currently works on a project about the distribution of vegetation along an elevation gradient in Costa Rica. In his PhD-project, Miguel studies how disturbances affect plant species distributions at Costa Rican mountains. He is trying to understand the potential use of disturbance as management tool to help plants species persists under future warmer climate.

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Thomas C Sawe
Thomas has a strong interest in plant/animal/environment interactions. In his PhD project Thomas explores the interactions between forest cover, pollinator diversity and crop yield in Tanzania. Primarily, Thomas works in agroforestry systems around Mt Kilimanjaro and Mt Meru in the Kilimanjaro and Arusha Regions. There he studies the effects of forest cover and pollinating insects on the production of coffee and other crops.

Before commencing his PhD studies, Thomas worked as researcher at Tanzania Forestry Research Institute (TAFORI) where he mainly worked with restoration ecology, biodiversity assessment, tree improvement and tree breeding in the southern highlands and coastal forest of Tanzania. He also worked in the Miombo forest ecosystem which dominates Africa’s sub-Saharan vegetation, to assess degradation and estimate carbon dioxide emissions. Thomas has a BSc and MSc in forestry, majoring in biology, from Sokoine University of agriculture (SUA) in Morogoro Tanzania.