Speaker Bio: Carla Staver is an Assistat Professor at the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. Carla Staver received her B.A. in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology Columbia University and PhD from Princeton University, USA. Her work on determining mechanisms driving the dynamics and distribution of biomes is widely recognised. Her research uses a combination of empirical and modeling approaches to understand how local interactions of trees with their resource and disturbance environment scale up to predict landscape- and continental-scale patterns in tree cover and the distributions of biomes. Carla Staver is a recipient of George Mercer Award, Ecological Society of America (2012), Jasper Loftus-Hills Young Investigators Award, American Society of Naturalists (2013), Runner-up for Harper Prize, British Ecological Society (2015) and Early Career Fellow of Ecological Society of America (2016).