Dr. Billur Malcoci

Biography

Billur Malcoci is a plant ecologist broadly interested in how climate change affects plants, individuals, and entire communities, as well as population dynamics and distributional patterns. Her scientific motivation is to understand the processes driving plant responses to climate change to improve predictions about biodiversity. She has a particular interest in the timing and pace of changes, transient dynamics, context dependencies, and unexpected lags—exploring why plant responses are slower than the rate of climate change. Malcoci has worked on whole-community transplant experiments to study phenology, performance, leaf and root traits, population dynamics, and community assembly under experimental climate change conditions. She has been involved in various projects as a postdoc in the Plant Ecology Group. Her research includes membership in the TransPlant Network to investigate whether plant communities follow predictable trajectories under varying abiotic and biotic conditions. She also examines how climate change has accelerated dynamics since the Holocene and uses trait plasticity to understand delays in species range shifts. Malcoci is part of initiatives to promote ecological forecasting and organizes workshops aimed at utilizing AI to address ecological challenges.

Research Interests