Lupe Leon Sanchez
Project overview
Lupe is working as part of a larger project co-funded by Science Foundation Ireland in the Republic of Ireland and the Department for Economy in Northern Ireland. The project started as a collaboration between Jon Yearsley at University College Dublin and Paul Caplat and Mark Emmerson at Queen's in Belfasst. The project entitled "Biodiversity, resilience and food security: understanding the role of biodiversity in maintaining food production" focusses on the resilience of grassland production systems and their capacity to resist, recover and adapt to future environmental change, whilst sustainably producing food for a growing global population.
Lupe has been working for 7 years carrying out manipulative field experiments, assessing the ecophysiological response of shrublands (semiarid ecosystems) and grasslands (temperate ecosystems) to climate change. Her interests are focused on plant ecology and ecophysiology, mainly the responses of plant communities to environmental factors, plant-soil interactions and ecosystem functioning.
Lupe finished her PhD in October 2016 at the University of Granada (Spain), entitled “Climate change effects on plant communities in semiarid gypsum ecosystems”.
During her PhD thesis, Lupe carried out manipulative field experiments in three different areas of Spain (with warming, rainfall exclusion and their combination), aiming to assess the ecophysiological response of Mediterranean shrubs to predicted climate change. After submitting her PhD thesis, Lupe worked at the University of Manchester as a temporary supporting technician in Richard Bardgett’s lab, helping with lab and field work for NERC Soil Security Programme.
In December 2016, Lupe started her Postdoc at Queen´s University Belfast, where she is working on the research project entitled: “Biodiversity, resilience and food security: understanding the role of biodiversity in maintaining food production” (Grassland Resilience project). This project focusses on the resilience of grassland production systems and their capacity to resist, recover and adapt to future environmental change, whilst sustainably producing food for a growing global population.
The fodder crisis, which occurred in 2012-13 in Ireland, consisted of a hot summer in 2012, followed by a particularly wet and cool winter and spring in 2013, which led to overall declines in grassland productivity and the size of sileage reserve on the island of Ireland. Our project uses this major climatic perturbation as a case study, to investigate grassland resilience, as it had a wide spread social, economic, and animal welfare impacts throughout the island of Ireland.
Within this project, Lupe has carried out a large field experiment imposing an experimental summer drought in 20 experimental sites across the island of Ireland, aiming to assess the resilience of grassland ecosystems used for food production in the island of Ireland to predicted climate change, and how biodiversity can help to improve the performance of the systems under and after a severe drought.
