BioEO
Functional Biodiversity & Earth Observation Lab
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Postdoctoral researchers
Kendall is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford, funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery. Broadly, Kendall’s research interests are in remote sensing applications to pollinator ecology, exploring how we can scale monitoring of pollinator communities and their interactions with plants across various environmental gradients. Kendall's postdoctoral research with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery will develop remote sensing approaches to characterise pollinator diversity and plant-pollinator interactions in nature recovery landscapes of Eastern Ghana. She is also a stipendiary lecturer in ecology at Worcester College.
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Before pursuing her DPhil and MPhil in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at Oxford, Kendall earned a BA in Environmental Science and Policy as well as English from Duke University. She completed her undergraduate thesis on governance and social-ecological impacts of marine protected areas in Indonesia. She has also worked with the Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing Lab to monitor land cover change in the coastal North Carolina. With a background in English literature and a love of visual art, she is passionate about communicating environmental issues in creative ways.
André Luis Acosta is an Italo-Brazilian ecologist with a BSc/Lic in Biological Sciences, an MSc in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, a PhD in Ecosystem Ecology, and postdoctoral training in Medicine (Epidemiology and Public Health).
His experience spans landscape and ecological modeling, climate-change scenarios, biological invasions, sustainable agriculture, and biodiversity conservation—integrated at the environment–human health interface. He is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the BioEO team, investigating how climate change and human activities shape tropical-forest resilience and how these changes, together with diverse socioeconomic contexts (Techno-Productive Trajectories), translate into spatiotemporal shifts in the incidence and transmission dynamics of vector-borne zoonotic diseases across the Amazon at multiple scales.
Dr Milton Barbosa
Postdoctoral researcher
Dr Felipe Martello
Postdoctoral researcher
Milton, a post-doctoral researcher specializing in tropical ecosystems with over 15 years of field research experience, focuses on understanding and predicting the impacts of global environmental changes on biodiversity and human well-being. His current research involves using remote sensing data to detect climate-induced forest degradation in South America.
He is also part of SinBiose Trajetorias, a collaborative project among Brazilian institutions, leading research on the influence of socioeconomic and environmental factors on the emergence of vector-borne diseases in the Amazon region. Additionally, Milton actively contributes to one of Brazil's Long-Term Ecological Research Projects (LTER/PELD – CNPq), where he investigates global changes in mountaintop grasslands.
Felipe is a community and spatial ecologist focusing on how spatial structure influences biodiversity and related ecological processes.
In his research, he studies the effects of anthropogenic landscape structures on different facets of biodiversity, including taxonomic diversity, functional diversity and beta diversity. Currently, he also seeks to use the multidimensionality of biodiversity to gain insights into natural capital biological assets, both in pristine and recovering natural areas. Felipe has also developed computational spatial modelling tools for nature recovery, including the simulation of ecological corridors and the identification of priority areas for restoration and conservation.
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He is currently an ecological remote sensing postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, funded by Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, where he is working on the use of Earth Observation data to map aspects of ecosystem functionality and resilience, and to assess the temporal dynamics of land use and land cover change in areas dedicated to nature recovery.
Dr Isamar Cortés
Postdoctoral researcher
Isamar is a postdoctoral research scientist exploring the effects of climate controls on tropical ecosystems. Her research combines fieldwork and remote sensing to understand how functional diversity is impacted due to changes in climate across tropical forests. Before moving to the U.K., Isamar received her Ph.D. from Montclair State University in New Jersey where she explored the effects of climate change on mangrove island systems across the Caribbean using remote sensing and numerical modelling techniques. In her spare time, Isamar enjoys several hobbies such as Magic the Gathering, board games and cooking Puerto Rican food. As any good Puerto Rican would do, she's often in search of plantains mofongo.
DPhil
students
Jed Soleiman
DPhil student
DPhil student
Lubasi Limweta
Jed Soleiman is passionate about ecological restoration and rewilding, and the intersection this shares with agriculture to improve outcomes for both people and the planet. Jed has progressed from his MPhil in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management, to DPhil in the University of Oxford's ECI Ecosystems Lab.
He is currently working to understand how mycorrhizal communities and functions respond to rewilding and regenerative agriculture, to find synergies that could help galvanise landscape scale conservation in the UK. Jed holds a BA in Geography from the University of Cambridge, and prior to his MPhil worked in circular economy, consulting on reusable packaging design and managing C-suite stakeholders.
In his spare time, Jed is also a keen gardener and forager who loves to share his passions with anyone who’s keen to listen!
Lubasi is a DPhil student in Biology, and Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford. His current research is supervised by Nathalie Seddon, William Thompson and Jesús Aguirre-Gutiérrez uses ecological remote sensing to assess the effectiveness of agroforests as Nature-Based solutions in enhancing agricultural landscapes and ecosystem resilience to climatic shocks. He is interested in understanding on-farm shade tree diversity and configuration influence on agroforest resilience and performance as wel as the impact of landscape composition on ecosystem health and resilience.
Prior to DPhil, he pursued an MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management at Oxford. He earned his undergraduate in Environmental Engineering from the Copperbelt University - Zambia. His undergraduate thesis evaluated the impacts of tobacco cultivation on Natural forests using remote sensing and GIS. Before joining Oxford, he worked in the Ministry of Water Development and Sanitation - Zambia as a district water development officer where he was involved in enhancing rural livelihood through the provision of clean water and sanitation, protection of the aquatic ecosystem in the district, as well as the implementation of Climate-resilient initiatives.
In his spare time, he loves travelling and viewing nature.
DPhil student
Stephanie Puggaard Koolen
DPhil student
Emily Stone
Steph is a DPhil student in Biology at the University of Oxford. Her research, co-supervised by Jesús, focuses on monitoring vegetation phenology across temperate deciduous forests and how it varies with different monitoring methods, including drones and satellite products. She is particularly interested in how higher moments of phenological distributions (variance, skewness, and kurtosis) change across space, time, and resolution.
Originally from Denmark, Steph holds a BSc in Ecological and Environmental Sciences with Management from the University of Edinburgh and a joint MSc in Sustainable Forest and Nature Management from the Universities of Copenhagen and Göttingen. Her undergraduate thesis compared land surface phenology derived from phenocams and MODIS across Brazilian dry tropical forests, while her master’s thesis examined how management interventions influence the structural complexity of temperate forests using LiDAR.
In her spare time, Steph is a keen hiker and is always looking for new places to go.
I’m Emily and I’m a DPhil student in the lab. I am originally from the United States - I did my undergraduate degree at Columbia University where I studied environmental science and human rights with a minor in Spanish. I then came to Oxford for my MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation, and Management, which is also when I first started working with tropical ecosystems. I am now researching the drivers of forest structure and function across tropical climate gradients, predominantly in West Africa. My first chapter is using a variety of LiDAR remote sensing datasets, and my subsequent projects will be looking at other variables such as soil texture and composition. Outside of the lab, I spend arguably too much of my time rowing - I am president of Linacre Boat Club, a coach at Somerville Boat Club, and a member of City of Oxford Rowing Club - and I am also a Junior Dean at Harris Manchester College, working with any students there who need support!
DPhil student
Paola
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​Visiting
Students
Davide Galhofa
DPhil student
Research project: Assessment of Climate Change Vulnerability in Western Mediterranean Oaks through the Integration of Complementary Spatially Explicit Modeling Methods.
Centre for Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Changes - Faculty of Sciences - University of Lisbon
William W.M. Verbiest
DPhil student
Research project: Elucidating carbon and biodiversity dynamics in Congo Basin forests.
Ghent University, Belgium
Past members
Dr Huanyuan Zhang-Zheng, Postdoctoral researcher (period),University of Oxford, UK
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Evie Huhtala, Graduate researcher (period),University of Oxford, UK
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Xiongjie Deng, DPhil student (period),University of Oxford, UK
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Waira Saraiva Machida, DPhil student (period ),Universidade Federal de Goiás, Brazil
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Banashree Thapa, MSc student (2020 - 2021),University of Oxford, UK
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Boipelo Tshwene Mauchaza, PhD student (2015 - 2020), University of Oxford, UK
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Iris Berger, MSc student (2019 - 2020), University of Oxford, UK
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Vaughn Lewis, MSc student (2019 - 2020), University of Oxford, UK
Matthew Livesey, MSc student (2019 - 2020), University of Oxford, UK
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Laura Velasquez Casallas, MSc student (2018 - 2019), University of Oxford, UK
Carly Sivilia, MSc student (2018 - 2019), University of Oxford, UK
Article from MSc. thesis accepted for publication and awarded the Alfred Russel Wallace Dissertation Prize from Oxford University.
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Julio Acosta, MSc student (2017 - 2018), Wageningen University & Research, NL
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Izak Yasrebi-de Kom, Bachelor student (2014 - 2017), University of Amsterdam, NL
Published article from thesis: “Yasrebi-de Kom I., JC Biesmeijer and Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J. Diversity and Distributions, 2019, (25), 1709-1720
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Kim Renkens, MSc student (2015 - 2016), University of Leiden, NL
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Koen Stam, MSc student (2015 - 2016), University of Leiden, NL
Robbert Poldermans, MSc student (2015 - 2016), University of Leiden, NL
Jolien Morren, MSc student (2014 - 2015), University of Leiden, NL
Bastiaen Boekelo, MSc student (2014 - 2015), University of Leiden, NL
Andoni Santander, MSc student (2013 - 2014), University of Leiden, NL
Leon Marshall, MSc student (2013 - 2014), University of Leiden, NL
Article from MSc. Thesis published: “Marshall, L…Aguirre-Gutiérrez, J. et al. Ecology and Evolution, 2014, 4426-4436.”