Conservation Biology

About us

I am a landscape ecologist and ecological modeller with more than ten years of postdoctoral experience in conservation science. I am interested in understanding how nature and society interact, and how both can be influenced by environmental policy and ecosystems management. I use quantitative tools to understand ecological patterns and processes across multiple spatio-temporal scales, from waterholes to forest stands to whole continents. I have applied these tools to many ecological questions, for example projecting species’ habitat suitability under climatic and land use scenarios or quantifying and mapping ecosystem services in semi-natural ecosystems under human management and climate change. Then, I use that ecological information to assist conservation planning. For example, to evaluate trade-offs and synergies between biodiversity conservation and agricultural or clean energy development at large scales or to identify optimal areas for forest restoration to maximize ecosystem service provision and ecological connectivity.

After 10 years of international postdoctoral research experience at institutions such as Monash University (Australia), the University of Melbourne (Australia), the Forest Science Center of Catalonia - CTFC - and the CREAF (Spain), the CATIE - Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (Costa Rica) and University of Toronto (Canada), I currently work in between the Biodiversity Change Lab and the ECOSPAT group at University of Lausanne on assessing the impacts of climate change on the biodiversity of glacial and proglacial landscapes across the Alps within the context of the PrioritICE Biodiversa+ project. At the University of Bern, I´m a research associate at the Conservation Biology Division where I co-lead a project on the same topic, with a special focus on biodiversity impacts of climate change on high alpine alluvial zones.