I am an ethnobiologist working on the dynamic relations among Indigenous Peoples and local communities, biota, and environments from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Since 2011, I have studied the complex relations between plants and peoples in different contexts including the cocoa farmers of the Dominican Republic, the Hutsul peoples in the Carpathian Mountains, and many ethnolinguistic groups of Italy.
My previous interdisciplinary work contributed to advancing understanding of the factors affecting the evolution, persistence, or erosion of local plant knowledge among Indigenous Peoples and local communities. This has important implications for the valorization and maintenance of Indigenous and local knowledge and could be key to supporting important biocultural relations in biodiversity-rich landscapes.
Since 2019, when I joined the ERC-funded LICCI project, my research has also explored the perception of environmental changes and the drivers of such change among Indigenous Peoples and local communities. The experience gained researching these topics made me aware of the relevance of ethnobiology for biodiversity conservation. Thus, since 2022 I have been a Margarita Salas fellow at the New York Botanical Garden and ICTA-UAB proposing the topic of cultural keystone species as an ethnobiological tool for biodiversity conservation.