Xavier
Picó
I am interested in understanding the processes that govern the functioning, dynamics and adaptive variation in plants. To this end, I work primarily at the population level with the annual plant Arabidopsis thaliana, but also with other groups of annual and perennial plant species exhibiting varying degrees of diversification. My research focuses on the western Mediterranean basin, as it is one of the world’s centres of plant diversification and speciation. My work is multidisciplinary, integrating data from the field and from experiments under controlled and natural conditions with molecular data in order to unravel the ecological and genetic bases of plant evolution.
The results of my research are transferred to society on two levels. Within the scientific community, beyond publications (in open access) published exclusively by scientific societies, by sharing all the resources generated—such as data and genetic material—in public repositories available to other research groups. In civil society, by representing the CSIC on the Participation Council of the Sierra de las Nieves National Park to promote research in the field of natural sciences within this protected area.
