Gustavo Adolfo Silva Arias

B.Sc. (2006, Universidad Nacional de Colombia). M.Sc. with focus on systematics (2012, Universidad Nacional de Colombia). Ph.D. in Genetics and Molecular Biology (2016, UFRGS) with a research scholar stay in the Ohio State University.

I am interested in fundamental questions about geographical and ecological drivers of diversification processes both bellow and above species level, with special focus in the Neotropical region. I am devoted to the integration of ecological and molecular techniques to assist biodiversity conservation planning in critical ecosystems and to get new insights about evolutionary processes that shape the current biodiversity patterns.

I have extensive experience in population genetics and phylogenetic analyses, several techniques of niche modelling, handling of large databases, develop climatic raster surfaces, handling of genomic data, and the implementation of spatial explicit analyses, regression models, and coalescent model-based approaches using the UNIX shell, R, and Python programming languages.

I have conducted fieldwork in Colombia and Brazil collecting more than 2000 plant specimens in different ecosystems and plant material for DNA extraction. I studied the vegetation structure and composition in various ecosystems including the Páramo, Andean forests, tropical wetlands and grasslands and studied reproductive biology and pollination in Orchidaceae (2014-2015, Brazil).