Masha van der Sande

Dr. Masha van der Sande is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Wageningen University & Research, specializing in Forest Ecology and Forest Management. Her research focuses on understanding tropical forest resilience to disturbances such as fire, drought, and climate change. She leads projects investigating Amazon fire resilience mechanisms and coordinates the 2ndFOR network for secondary tropical forest recovery studies. Her work integrates paleoecological data (e.g., pollen and charcoal records) with modern ecological observations to analyze long-term forest dynamics.

She teaches and supervises courses including Ecological Methods and MSc Internships in Forest Ecology. Key collaborations include the ERC-PANTROP project on pantropical forest succession and the ROBIN initiative exploring biodiversity's role in climate change mitigation. Her research spans spatial scales from individual species to continental-level analyses, emphasizing functional traits and community-level processes.

Dr. van der Sande's expertise lies in linking historical and contemporary ecological data to predict future forest responses to global change. She has published extensively on topics like fire resilience, secondary forest recovery, and the impacts of human activities on tropical ecosystems.