Research agenda

I am a social-environmental researcher interested in understanding how societies have interacted with their surrounding environment, past and present, and how that interaction has shaped and transformed each other. My research agenda includes examining how society values, social and cultural institutions, economic and market incentives, public policies, and governance arrangements mediate decision-making on land use and land cover changes, looking at their implications for forest loss and regrowth dynamics, the management of natural management, and peoples' livelihoods.

I completed my Ph.D. in Environmental Science at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs (2020), with a minor in Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change from the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. That complemented an M.Sc. in Tropical Forest Science (2010) from Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA).

This integrative training equipped me with methodological and analytical tools and skills from the social and environmental sciences to work across interdisciplinary boundaries. In my work, I employ mixed methods and multivariate analysis to integrate fieldwork in forest plots and participant observation in case studies with data from interviews, national census, remote sensing, geospatial analysis, archival research, and discourse analysis. Most of my research has been conducted in the Amazon River basin, notably in Brazil, and more recently in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru.

This webpage aims to share information on past and ongoing research projects I have developed and collaborated on.