Dr. Anna Traveset receives the SCB Leandre Cervera Career Achievement Award

14/07/2024

The Catalan Society of Biology has awarded the prestigious SCB Leandre Cervera Professional Career Award to Dr. Anna Traveset Vilaginés, a prominent researcher at the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies (IMEDEA, CSIC-UIB). This award recognizes her outstanding contribution to the advancement and dissemination of life sciences.

The award ceremony took place on Thursday, July 11, at the Cloister of the Institute of Catalan Studies in Barcelona, during the Night of Biology.

Career

Dr. Traveset holds a degree in biology from the University of Barcelona and earned her PhD in plant-animal interaction ecology from the University of Pennsylvania, conducting her fieldwork in Costa Rica under the supervision of Daniel Janzen. She subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the Doñana Biological Station (CSIC) and moved to Mallorca, where she currently works as a CSIC research professor in the Global Change Research Group (GCR) at IMEDEA.

Her research focuses mainly on island systems, exploring how biotic interactions influence plant regeneration and distribution, and how these interactions are affected by various global change drivers. Her main research lines currently include:

Evaluating the vulnerability of mutualistic networks to extinctions due to disturbances such as habitat loss, biological invasions, and climate change.
Determining the effectiveness of vertebrates as pollinators and seed dispersers in islands.
Studying trophic relationships at the land-sea interface and in small islands, analyzing their vulnerability to global change.

Dr. Traveset coordinates research projects on various islands, including the Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Galápagos, and Seychelles. In 2022, she obtained the ERC AdG project "Determinants of island ecological complexity in the context of global change" to investigate island ecosystem biodiversity from the tropics to the Arctic.

With nearly three hundred published works, her research has had a significant impact on the scientific community, ranking among the top 1% of the most influential researchers in the field of Ecology/Environment. She has supervised numerous students and researchers, including seventeen PhD students and fourteen postdocs, and serves on the editorial board of several scientific journals. She has represented Spain on national and international committees (LIFE, Eurodiversity, IUBS) and was vice president of the Spanish Association of Terrestrial Ecology (AEET). From 2019 to 2024, she has been the institutional delegate of CSIC in the Balearic Islands.

In addition to her research work, Dr. Traveset actively contributes to scientific outreach, participating in Science Week and offering seminars in schools and institutes. She has led citizen science projects on pollinators and developed the mobile app POLINIZAPP, aimed at educating schoolchildren about pollination. She also co-directed the documentary "The Pollinator Crisis" and coordinated the project "Sound Guide of Pollinators."

For her career achievements, she has received several awards, including the Luis Balaguer Distinction from the Spanish Association of Terrestrial Ecology (2023), the Margarita Salas Medal from CSIC (2023), the Ramon Llull Award from the Government of the Balearic Islands (2022), the King Jaime I Award in the category of Environmental Protection (2017), and the Bartomeu Darder Award from the Natural History Society of the Balearic Islands (1996).