Víctor Resco Dedios

My research interests have taken on a life of their own, and I no longer have any control over them. Initially, I was interested in understanding forest dynamics to guide forestry operations, so my first research focused on forest regeneration in mixed forests. Then I realised that you cannot understand forest dynamics without understanding the structure and function of trees, so I did my PhD in Wyoming on stress physiology and its relationship to phenotypic changes and, more specifically, on the processes that lead to the invasion of woody plants in the Sonoran Desert landscapes. My colleagues at the time sparked my interest in understanding how these physiognomic changes affect interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere and the role of biotic versus abiotic controls. For some reason, while working at these broader scales, a Marie Curie fellowship in Liverpool led me to question whether molecular controls, such as the circadian clock, could affect ecosystem fluxes, and the development of the field of circadian plant ecology has been one of the main focuses of my research ever since. Subsequently, I began working at the Fire Research Institute at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, which led me to become more interested in exploring how understanding the energy balance between the biosphere and the atmosphere could help predict the incidence of fires, and these predictions of forest fires in different landscapes and over time have been another of my obsessions ever since. More recently, and probably since my time at the University of Western Sydney, I began to question the concept of species and the extent to which interspecific variation in growth is less than intraspecific variation. Since my appointment in Lleida, I have mainly devoted myself to finishing projects and organising and developing all these ideas. At the moment, it is impossible to predict what the next stop will be, as I am a victim of my ideas and it is they that tell me where to go next.