Elvira Cuevas

Elvira Cuevas Viera is a Puerto Rican ecologist. She is a professor in the department of biology at University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus where she serves as director of the Center for Applied Tropical Ecology and Conservation.

Early life and education Cuevas was born on August 20, 1950, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She became interested in science at a young age and originally planned to go into medicine. She switched gears and decided to move to focus on ecology after taking an ecology course under Herminio Lugo Lugo at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus (UPR-RP). She graduated with a bachelor's and master's degrees in biology at UPR-RP. Her 1975 master's thesis was titled Changes in selected water quality parameters as influenced by land use patterns in the Espiritu Santo drainage basin. Cuevas completed a Ph.D. in ecology at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) in 1984. She was the first graduate in the field of ecology at IVIC in Venezuela. She was a postdoctoral fellow with the International Institute of Tropical Forestry. In May 2004, Cuevas became an adjunct faculty member in the department of management and conservation of natural resources in the faculty of veterinary and zootechnology at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.

Awards and honors In 2000, Cuevas was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study plant sciences. In 2019, she became the first Puerto Rican woman named to the .

Tiessen, H., Cuevas, E., & Chacon, P. (1994). The role of soil organic matter in sustaining soil fertility. Nature, 371(6500), 783–785. Martinelli, L. A., Piccolo, M. C., Townsend, A. R., Vitousek, P. M., Cuevas, E., McDowell, W.... & Treseder, K. (1999). Nitrogen stable isotopic composition of leaves and soil: tropical versus temperate forests. Biogeochemistry, 46(1–3), 45–65. Tanner, E. V. J., Vitousek, P. A., & Cuevas, E. (1998). Experimental investigation of nutrient limitation of forest growth on wet tropical mountains. Ecology, 79(1), 10–22. Myers, R. J. K., Palm, C. A., Cuevas, E., Gunatilleke, I. U. N., & Brossard, M. (1994). The synchronisation of nutrient mineralisation and plant nutrient demand. Cuevas, E., & Medina, E. (1988). Nutrient dynamics within Amazonian forests. Oecologia, 76(2), 222–235.