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I am and NERC Independent Research Fellow at the School of Geography and the Environment and the Environmental Change Institute. In my work I try to understand the role that plant functional characteristics play in the resilience of tropical forests and make use of field assessment and also lots of remote sensing data from drones and satellites. Currently I am working across several countries including Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ghana, Gabon, Malaysia and Australia. See more about my work on my personal website.

I am always open to discuss research opportunities at bachelor, MSc and PhD level, feel free to contact me if interested.

The goal of my research is to disentangle how a changing climate has impacted, is currently driving and will modify in the near future our natural forest ecosystems.

Much is still unknown about how tropical forests around the world are responding to an increasingly fast changing climate, and there may be regions that are or will experience stronger biodiversity shifts and may be in more need of protection or regulation.

Having grown-up in Guadalajara, one of the biggest cities in Mexico where not much nature is around, I decided to spend a year living with the indigenous "Raramuri" community in Northern Mexico to learn from their vision of nature.

My research interests come from understanding the importance nature has on our livelihoods - something I learnt through my experiences with indigenous communities in Mexico and abroad.

Publications

Aguirre Gutierrez, J., Stevens, N. and Berenguer, E. (2023) “Valuing the functionality of tropical ecosystems beyond carbon”, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 38(12), pp. 1109–1111.
Aguirre Gutierrez, J. (2022) “Functional susceptibility of tropical forests to climate change”. University of Oxford.
Rurangwa, M., Aguirre Gutierrez, J., Matthews, T. and Whittaker, R. (2021) “Effects of land-use change on avian taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity in a tropical montane rainforest”, Diversity and Distributions, 27(9), pp. 1732–1746.
Aguirre Gutierrez, J., Rifai, S., Shenkin, A., Oliveras, I., Bentley, L., Svátekd, M., Girardin, C., Both, S., Riutta, T., Berenger, E., Kissling, W., Bauman, D., Raab, N., Moore, S., Farfan-Rios, W., Figueiredo, A., Matias Reis, S., Josué, E., Evouna Ondo, F., N’ssi Bengone, N., Mihinhou, V., Moraes de Seixaso, M., Adu-Bredu, S., Abernethy, K. and Asners, G. (2020) “Pantropical modelling of canopy functional traits using Sentinel-2 remote sensing data”, Remote Sensing of Environment, 252.
Aguirre Gutierrez, J., Malhi, Y., Lewis, S., Fauset, S., Adu-Bredu, S., Affum-Baffoe, K., Baker, T., Gvozdevaite, A., Hubau, W., Moore, S., Peprah, T., Ziemińska, K., Phillips, O. and Oliveras, I. (2020) “Long-term droughts may drive drier tropical forests towards increased functional, taxonomic and phylogenetic homogeneity”, Nature Communications [Preprint].
Aguirre Gutierrez, J., Oliveras, I., Rifai, S., Moore, S. and Malhi, Y. (2019) “Drier tropical forests are susceptible to functional changes in response to a long-term drought”, Ecology Letters, 22(5), pp. 855–865.
Raes, N. and Aguirre Gutierrez, J. (2018) “A Modeling Framework to Estimate and Project Species Distributions in Space and Time”, in Hoorn, C., Perrigo, P., and Antonelli, A. (eds.) Mountains, Climate and Biodiversity. Wiley.
Gama, R., Aguirre Gutierrez, J. and Stech, M. (2017) “Ecological niche comparison and molecular phylogeny segregate the invasive moss species Campylopus introflexus (Leucobryaceae, Bryophyta) from its closest relatives”, Ecology and Evolution, 7(19), pp. 8017–8031.
Lens, F., Vos, R., Charrier, G., Van Der Niet, T., Merckx, V., Baas, P., Aguirre Gutierrez, J., Jacobs, B., Chacon Dória, L., Smets, E., Delzon, S. and Janssens, S. (2016) “Scalariform-to-simple transition in vessel perforation plates triggered by differences in climate during the evolution of Adoxaceae”, Annals of Botany, 118(5), pp. 1043–1056.
Aguirre Gutierrez, J. and Duivenvoorden, J. (2010) “Can we expect to protect threatened species in protected areas?”, Revista Mexicana de Biodiversidad, 81(003), pp. 875–882.