I am a passionate scientist. Research for me is a way of life, a way to understand our place in a complex reality. It is also a way to express love for the things I care about. My fundamental question is about humans in nature, the interlinked, entangled and dialectical relationship we have with everything else. This is both a philosophical and a scientific question, to me science is philosophy and philosophy is science in a very Ionian manner. From this departure point arises the question about urbanisation, as a fundamental planetary process that is profoundly changing this relationship. I am unveiling complex interconnections, metabolic relationships with land use land cover change, urban heat islands, informality, and ecosystem services among other topics. I try to pursue a holistic, transdisciplinary research approach. I understand science as one large human enterprise, rather than strictly sticking to traditional disciplinary boundaries. I focus on connections, and relationships, rather than on (arbitrary) distinctions; to me (like for Ionians) everything is connected to everything else. My cross-cutting approach is spatially explicit focusing on the metabolism of socio-ecological systems. I integrate advanced quantitative analysis, remote sensing and GIS to understand the underlying processes giving rise to the particular spatial structure of socio-ecological systems and its links to ecological and economic functions, from local to global scales. I pay strong attention to conceptual aspects.

I have worked across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I enjoy editorial work as well. I am the editor of ECOSYSTEM SERVICES (Q1, IF 2024 6.1), managing all incoming special issues. If you are interested in proposing an SI in our journal, please contact me here. I am also an editorial board member of Landscape and Urban Planning.

I was an executive committee member of the Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP) from 2018-2024, a member of the Society for Urban Ecology (SURE), a member of the International Society for Ecological Economics, a chartered member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and recently became a member of the International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE) after more than a decade of joining IALE conferences and events.

I’m vegetarian by taste rather than reason although I recognize the environmental, nutritional and ethical advantages of a plant-based diet. I love roller and snowboarding, while I bike less than I would like to. Reading printed books is one of my passions. The books with dedicatory that I treasure are maybe the only fetishism that I allow to myself. My daily life is linguistically complicated, unfolding in three languages (English, Spanish and Czech) with uncertain outcomes at times. I do come from South America, from Chile, but I lived for so long abroad that at times is difficult to find the remains of the Chilean person between the central European culture that expresses through me in unexpected and even surprising ways. Humans are a highly adaptive species, and that is something that I am experiencing on my skin.