Grace I. Ridder, M. Sc.

Grace studied at the University of Oregon and graduated Magna Cum Laude with an Honors undergraduate degree in Biology. During this time, she worked in the McGuire Tropical Microbial Ecology Lab, as well as, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Barro Colorado Island, Panama. With the McGuire lab, she studied the Janzen-Connell effects of soil pathogens on tropical tree species in El Yunque tropical rainforest, Puerto Rico. Her thesis was completed in 2019 and titled “Oomycete Distribution Across Disturbance Gradients in Tropical Rain Forests”. Since then, she has completed her joint master’s degree in Tropical Biodiversity and Ecosystems via Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), University of Ruhuna (RUH), University of Florence (UNIFI). She worked largely with Joint Species Distribution Modeling and focused her efforts on identifying and quantifying the effects of spatial autocorrelation within covariates of large-scale modeling efforts using data on West African Tree species from the RAINBIO mega-database. Her thesis was completed in 2021 and was titled “Joint Species Distribution Modeling of West African Tree Species”.

Currently, Grace is completing her PhD in Ecology and Evolution at Charles University, Prague. She is investigating the newly emerging Equilibrium Theory of Biodiversity Dynamics via simulation modeling with her supervisor, David Storch. This theory states that species diversity is limited by the relationships between resource limitation, species abundance distributions, population size dependent extinction, population size dependent speciation, and total abundances.