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Associate Research Scientist in Forest Ecology, Universidade de São Paulo

Renato Lima is a forest ecologist who is broadly interested in the mechanisms controlling the structure and biodiversity of tropical forests in a world of global changes. More specifically, he is interested in how tropical tree communities organize themselves, what explains and impacts their huge diversity and how we can restore them.

He holds a bachelor's degree in Ecology, a MSc. in Forestry and a PhD in Ecology at the Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, where he also worked as a postdoctoral researcher. He was a post-doctorate fellow at the Laboratoire Evolution & Diversité Biologique (Toulouse, France) and then he held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands. He is currently based in Paris, at the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity.

His research is mainly focused on the tropical forests of South America, which he investigates using the Neotropical Tree Communities database (TreeCo), a long-term project that compiles and stores data from vegetation inventories that he leads since 2014.