Dr Kristiina Visakorpi

DPhil candidate

Funded by the Oskari Huttunen Foundation

Supervised by Sofia Gripenberg and Terhi Riutta

Research Interests

I am interested in food webs and interactions between species, how these relationships shape ecological communities and how this affects ecosystem functioning. In my DPhil project I am studying community and ecosystem level effects of keystone insect herbivores on oak trees in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire. I am concentrating on how early-season herbivores affect the structure of food webs involving leaf mining and galling insects, and on important ecosystem processes such as photosynthesis and leaf decomposition.

Publications

Visakorpi, K., Gripenberg, S., Malhi, Y., Bolas, C., Oliveras, I., Harris, N., Rifai, S & Riutta, T. (2018). Small-scale indirect plant responses to insect herbivory could have major impacts on canopy photosynthesis and isoprene emission. New Phytologist, doi: 10.1111/nph.15338.