Nelson R. Salinas

Hola. Welcome to my personal website.

Here you will find info about my research and academic activities. I am a botanist who has worked mostly on diversity, conservation, and evolutionary biology of Neotropical plants. However, during the last few years I have also become interested on biodiversity informatics and computational biology.

Currently, I am a data analyst at the Instituto Sinchi. Through this appointment, I am studying the dynamics of plant diversity in the Amazon region of Colombia, using the excellent resources of the Colombian Amazonian Herbarium. Prior to this appointment, I was a researcher at the Instituto Humboldt, a data analyst at IDEAM and the Instituto Sinchi, and a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden.

You can access my cv here.

Research interests

1. Neotropical plant diversity and systematics.

Tropical forests are some of the most diverse, yet endangered, ecosystems on the planet. An strategy to tackle this problem is to gather basic biological information of organisms and ecosystems that are particularly affected by anthropogenic activities. I have worked on systematics of Bromeliaceae (pineapples), Costaceae (spiral gingers), and Ericaceae (blueberries), and conducted general diversity surveys in Amazonian, Andean, and Choco forests from my home country, Colombia. I have conducted most of this work with collaborators from the Instituto de Ciencias Naturales, Instituto Sinchi, and the New York Botanical Garden.

Relevant output:

2. Biogeography.

Recognizing spatial patterns (biogeographic regions, areas of endemism, etc.) from geographic distributions of organisms is one of the main tasks of biogeography. However, biogeography has been marginalized from the statistical revolution that has recently transformed other subdisciplines of comparative biology. As a way to contribute towards such goals, I have worked on the implementation of a graphical statistical model (Hidden Markov Random Fields) to uncover areas of endemism from geographic distribution data.

Relevant output:

Contact

Nelson R. Salinas
nrsalinas@gmail.com
Data Analyst Consultant
Herbario Amazonico Colombiano COAH Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones Científicas Sinchi Bogotá

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