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Flora, vegetation and ecology in the Venezuelan Andes: a case study of Ramal
de Guaramacal
Cuello Alvarado, N.L.
Publication date
2010
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
Cuello Alvarado, N. L. (2010). Flora, vegetation and ecology in the Venezuelan Andes: a case
study of Ramal de Guaramacal. Universiteit van Amsterdam, Institute for Biodiversity and
Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED).
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to express my deeply appreciation to all those people that have supported me during the time I have been doing research in Guaramacal. However, there are so many people that have helped me in many different ways and occasions that I am afraid I would fail to mention every one. So, here I will refer mainly to those people who have been most helpful during the last four years that I have been working for completing this PhD thesis. For all those people I omitted their names, receive my apologies for that but also my sincere gratitude for their support. First, I am deeply grateful to my promotor Prof. Dr. Antoine Cleef and co-promotor Dr. Joost Duivenvoorden for their friendship and support, without them, it had not been possible for me to complete this thesis. Antoine has been a great tutor in both professional and personal aspects, from the very moment he accepted to be my promotor, despite of the distance, he has been always available for communication, attending my questions, reviewing my manuscripts, guiding and encouraging me with enthusiasm and providing me great and valuable ideas. I appreciate also his support during my stays in Amsterdam, where he not only taught me a lot, working with my data, providing me literature and discussing ideas, but also he has been so thoughtful helping me and my family finding the best place to live and making us to feel at home. In summary, it has been a tremendous experience and a great honor working with Antoine. Joost has been also very supportive and inspiring. He taught me with a great patience and brilliant skills how to work with some technology tools for analysis ecological data to a high level of abstraction and to interpret results to obtain meaningful information. I feel privileged to share his innovative ideas and co-authoring a manuscript with him.
I thank to my other promotor Prof. Dr. Henry Hooghiemstra for his support and for reviewing and providing comments that help to improve some chapters of this thesis. I thank also to the IBED secretaries staff and colleagues for their opportune collaboration when required. Special thanks to Jody Dos Santos, Ada Hoogendorp and Mary Parra. Marcela Moscol gave me a friendly support during my stays in Amsterdam providing me always with useful tips.
My family and I enjoyed and appreciate very much the hospitality and invitations we received during our stays in The Netherlands. Specially, the exquisite dinners we shared with Antoine and friends at the Indonesian restaurant. Visiting Harlem and sharing with Joost and his family in a lovely evening at their home. Also, the kind and delightful evenings we pass with Paul Maas and Hiltje Maas van de Kramer at their home in Bunnik. We thank to the Gijs Haverkate family for lending us their house and making us to feel it as our home.
I am indebted to the UNELLEZ (grants SEI-23195107, SEI-23105102); CONICIT (grant S1-97001662) and FONACIT (grant PEM-2001002165) which have supported fieldwork and equipment for this study. UNELLEZ also granted me permission and financial support for all my visits to Amsterdam to work on my PhD program. Alberta Mennega Fund (Utrecht University) is acknowledged for the financial contribution to my stay at IBED, in my visit to Amsterdam in 2007.
251 Acknowledgements
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INPARQUES and MARN are thanked for the corresponding permits, as well as the Superintendente of Guaramacal National Park TSU Amilcar Bencomo for his constant collaboration. I also thank to all the staff of park rangers of Guaramacal National Park, for being so eager to help when required, among them Ramon Aldana, Yelitza Briceño, Yilson Camacho, Jorge Rivero, Amabilis Teran. I specially thank to the park rangers Ramón Caracas and Luis Zambrano† who collaborated in most of the field trips.Many helpers assisted in fieldwork including students, park rangers, villagers, colleagues, brothers and friends. Special thanks to Wilfredo Albarran, Karina Bastidas, Oscar León, Luis A. Linarez, Pedro Tovar and Máximo Valladares for their solidarity and recurrent field assistant during the last four years.
I am deeply thankful to the Herbario PORT staffs which have been very supportive during these past four years. I am grateful to Angelina Licata, who made all profile vegetation illustrations. Angelina has been as an older sister to me, always very supportive. She also helped me with species identifications and herbarium specimens’ curator. Rosalinda Parra and Elida Mendez were very helpful with the specimens processing and management. During these past four years, Mannelly Ramírez, José Farreras and Luis Miguel Leonido, have been very collaborative when required, with my teaching and other related activities at UNELLEZ. I appreciate the work done by Basil Stergios (UNELLEZ), Laurence Dorr (US) and Miguel Niño (UNELLEZ), who have also collected plants in Guaramacal and surrounded mountains, contributing with a valuable herbarium reference collection for my specimen identifications. G. Davidse (MO) and S. Laegaard (AAU) were helpful with the identification of some selected grasses. I thank also D. Griffin III (FLAS), Guido van Rennen (Amsterdam) and Juan Carlos Benavides (Colombia) for identification of bryophytes and H.J.M. Sipman (B) for lichens identification. Ross D. Morrison (University of Leicester, UK) kindly corrected and improved the English text of chapters 2-4. Beryl Simpson (Austin) provided important comments and language editing on the earlier version of the manuscript of chapter 5.
Finally, but the most important, I thank to my family for their support. My husband Gerardo Aymard was the first person to push me to pursuit this PhD and hold me all the time during this last years. Gerardo has been very collaborative with literature finding and discussing ideas to contribute in one of my thesis’s chapters, while being also very supportive and affective at home. My daughter Marianne has been so understanding with her mom’s work, giving me no more than happiness, pride and satisfaction of having a great behaved, responsible and excellent scholar teenager, while I have been so busy working on my PhD. My mother, brothers and sisters have always been very supportive. I specially thank to my niece Karim Rodriguez Cuello for designing the cover of this thesis.
Working in Guaramacal have been a passion to me, still there are many things I wish to study there. I thank God for giving me life and the chance to be in this marvelous and amazing natural place, which I wish to be conserved forever. To all those people that have helped me in any way to work in Guaramacal, thank you very much.
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