By SORTEE | July 4, 2022
[SORTEE member voices is a weekly Q&A with a different SORTEE member]
Name: Ana Benítez López.
Date: 09 July 2021.
Position: Postdoc researcher (Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación Fellow).
Research and/or work interests: I am an ecologist with broad interests in spatial ecology, macroecology, biodiversity conservation and global change biology. I am interested in the factors that determine species distributions and species abundance, with an emphasis on the effect of anthropogenic drivers and how these may drive local populations or species to extinction.
My main scientific achievements include incorporating complex meta-analytical and predictive models to study the effect of global change drivers on species abundance patterns across large scales. This approach involves using text-mining techniques to compile large datasets from the literature, and the coupling of georeferenced data with spatial information on anthropogenic drivers and species life-history traits.
What’s an open science practice or topic that you’ve changed your views on within the last few years? Why?
Sharing the scripts to reproduce the analysis in a paper. This has been extremely rewarding for me as I could reuse part of others' code to understand how to perform an analysis and how to apply it to my research. In turn I now share my code in the papers I publish so that, maybe, others can benefit and/or point out any possible mistakes or ways to optimize the code.
What is something about you that your scientist colleagues might find surprising?
I won a silver medal in the European Championship of 2000 playing with the Spain women’s national under-18 football team. We lost against Germany, of course.
Where to find you online?:
Twitter: @anabenlop
Google Scholar
ResearchGate
